ABSTRACT. This work investigates the hero figure in its generalised role in literary genres so as to understand its continued existence in the cultural manifestations of our contemporary society. This is an analysis of heroes of different times and forms following a loosely chronological pattern so as to see logic in their changes and mutations through human history. Such changes are manifest in some key works in the canon of Western literature and also in some new forms of entertainment media. It becomes noticeable that while the hero figure changes in appearance and representation, it does not change in its essence as a tool of idealisation and reflection and a way of questioning our world.

 Keywords: cinema, hero, video games, Western literature 

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Having fought in the war, being a renowned figure in Literature with an extensive catalogue of poetry and prose both fiction and nonfiction of over 140 works, Robert von Ranke Graves (1895-1985), is a controversial figure that is perhaps best known for his autobiography Goodbye to All That (2000) first launched in 1929. The book was later revised in 1957, but nonetheless its first publication caused him to lose most of his friends, such as the famous Siegfried Sassoon. The book is renowned for its portrayal of the war, with its futility and even a kind of grim, maybe even black, comedy that creates a disturbing comic effect. War, while dominating most of the narrative, is not however the sole subject of the book as it explores and illustrates a great deal of Graves’ life before and after his involvement in the conflict. It begs the question of what exactly he is saying ‘goodbye’ to. Is it, as he says in his original 1929 edition, a parting with all the people and happenings of his past and merely a means of earning money (Edwards, 2005: 27)? Is it merely a goodbye to his divorced wife and children and England as home, as he claims at the end of the revised 1957 edition? To answer these questions it is necessary to examine to text itself for what exactly it is that Graves depicts to us as he weaves the tale of his life. This work shall use the new revised 1957 edition for its purposes.

The book opens with an acknowledgement of the author’s intention of adhering to convention of the autobiographical memoir form of literature, which has a focus on fact. It can already be seen as an attempt at deception by the author as, even in the revised edition; false anecdotes abound, such as the heating of water for tea by shooting a machinegun (Fussell, 2000: 206-7). Factual errors, such as wrong dates, and misplaced or even fictionalised events can be found throughout the book, to the point that Fussell (p.203) calls it the ‘stagiest’ significant First World War memoir and deems a it satire (p. 207). Yet, Graves himself claims that falsity is a necessity if one is to engage with memories, specially ones as traumatic as those of the trench soldier in the Great War (In Fussell p. 207), making such alleged gaffes required in order to achieve a verisimilitude with the mind and experience of those involved in such events as described in the narrative.  This leads one to understand that, although this is a biography and thus based on facts, Graves makes use of artistic freedom in crafting his tale in order to achieve certain effects. It makes Goodbye to All That more and less than a conventional biography for where it sacrifices realism and factual accuracy it gains artistic depth through. For example, it includes some simple symbolism such as Graves’ abandoning of his sword, an object that has long been the symbol of gentility and chivalric values; as well as dramatic ironies, such as the episode involving Probert, the man who got bullied by his battalion for insisting on not going to the war, only for the same battalion to be later decimated throughout the war leaving him as sole survivor.

A closer look into such instances that colour Graves’ portrayal of his history and his world shall help elucidate just what is it exactly that the author intends to part himself with through his novel. The first nine parts of the novel concern themselves with his early life prior to his joining of the Armed Forces. In the very first page of the narrative we are told of his ‘strong instinct against drawing-room activities’ (p. 9). His dislike of classical Victorianisms is from that very moment presented to the reader, the constant portrayal of what represents that society as ludicrous and insufficient is a great part of the book and Graves, as a character, comes to gradually shed them away as he progresses through the story. His religion is inherited from his family and environment, ‘I had never met an unbeliever’ (p. 19). His class prejudice is embedded in him by his society as well,

I had thought of ‘Master’ and ‘Miss’ as merely as merely vocatives prefixes used for addressing other people’s children; but now I found that the servants were the lower classes, and that we were ‘ourselves’.

I accepted this class separation as naturally as I had accepted religious dogma, (p. 19)

Graves goes to pains to show us the depth of such prejudice – ‘All this uncouthness made me think of the servants as somehow not quite human.’ (p. 20) – and the effect religion had on him – ‘My religious training developed in me a great capacity for fear’ (p. 20) ‘a superstitious conscience and a sexual embarrassment from which I have found it very difficult to free myself.’ (p. 20-1) Another influence showed in a dark light is that of the public school as forcing homosexuality on its pupils through its system (p. 23). Its spirit is described as ‘fundamental evil’ (p. 36), with its bullying and social caste system where the ‘bloods’ (p. 42) reign, reinforcing masculine stereotypes of sportsman over scholar. There is also a complete disconnection between the administration and the students (p. 39), in sum it is shown as the rotten core of society, the prime model of its vicious and ugly nature.

That is not to say that Graves’ portrayal of pre-war society is completely negative; on the contrary, pre-war Germany for instance is represented in most idyllic terms, and his visits there referred to as the ‘best things of my early childhood’ (p. 25). However, even the big manor and perfect summers of his pre-war Germany, with its bushes of blueberries and animals scattered about and delicious Bavarian cuisine, is not also without its dark side. We are made aware of its existence due to exploitation of work force in a feudalistic manner (p. 28). Graves symbolically represents this duality by his description of the road,

Apple and pear trees lined every road (…) What we least liked in Bavaria were the wayside crucifixes with their realistic blood and wounds, and the ex-voto pictures, like sign-boards, of naked souls in purgatory grinning for anguish among high red and yellow flames. (p. 29)

While the spoils are richer, damnation is forever a constant; or rather, it is precisely because they use sin as warranty that such heights can be achieved through a trip through the underworld. This is no Eden but the Elysian. Munich, on the other hand, is the sinister (p. 29) reality of the male political Germany, the heart of darkness. North Wales, conversely, is a more rugged land with ruins and hills and wild berries and Graves describes it as a more spiritual place, independent of history or geography, where he first could write as himself. Interestingly, he makes a line between himself and himself as a ‘Graves’, he also poignantly does not describe any property as he does with Germany. In another symbolic note, Graves goes at some length to describe the nature of climbing, the social aspects of the activity, and how he used it to overcome his fears. The interesting metaphor comes in the form of the Crow that disturbs him by circling around during a climb, ‘because one climbs only up and down, or sideways, and the raven seemed to be suggesting diverse other possible dimensions of movement – tempting us to let go our hold and join him.’ Here Graves can very well be taken to be standing in for the mode of thinking of the time, so imbibed in its own nectar that cannot account for other possibilities. The expectation that cavalry would still play an important part in the First World War is the perfect example of how blinded by tradition society was. The crow as a bird often linked to death and disaster which here plays the awakening role of the war to come. It is a war that, like Graves mentions before, ‘upsets’ his ‘calculations’ of the future (p. 54), and also heralds the end of the pre-military part of the novel.

Graves’ pre-war period is then no idyllic utopian time. On the contrary, it is a world of light and dark very much embroiled in itself and incapable of seeing the edge of the precipice, with its disappearance there is a sense of both loss and freedom from old shackles. Even the fighting itself has a more ambivalent (Caesar, 1993: 215) sense, while the conflict itself is utterly atrocious and brutal – a waste of life and potential – there is also a certain sense of pride in fighting. Graves, for example, is proud of being part of the Royal Welch Fusiliers (p. 72), but even this pride is made quasi-comical by both the death toll that the squad continually suffers even before Graves is sent to the front (p. 73), and the lack of understanding by part of the men on the reasons for the war (p. 78).

His first arrival at the trenches in France could very well be an episode of Black Adder, as the top brass are seen, a quarter mile behind the reach of enemy fire, in luxury in an ornamented dug out having ‘civilised cooking’ and whisky (p. 84) while the soldiers are forced to live and fight in the mud alongside rats and dead bodies constantly having bullets whizz past their heads. The disconnection between the brass and the soldiers is absolute as can be seen by the case of the colonel reprimanding soldiers in the trench about unbuttoned shoulder-straps ‘while complaining that he had only  two blankets and that it was a deucedly cold night’. Through the trauma of war the concepts of the previous era are constantly dashed, patriotism and religion found themselves completely alien to the trenches of war, with regimental pride being the main force of maintaining morale (p. 157), but even inside it as can be seen it was not the brass that made for inspiration in one’s regiment, but the accomplishments past and present despite the rotten chain of command, it depended on a ‘caste-system of honour’ (pg. 157) and vilifying of the German’s as patriotic monstrous others, the anti-thesis of themselves.

This process of shedding cultural restraints and supports and replacing them with newfound primal and ‘personal’ ideas and ideals very evolves more and more throughout the development of this giant social trauma, to the point where Graves is shocked not by death of his fellow humans but that of animals (p. 173) and the armed forces throw away any sense of gentility by focusing on brutal and primal violent physical and violent training in order to inspire hate of the enemy if not pride in one’s nation (p. 195-6). It is at this point where the world outside the trenches becomes so maniacal and absurd and out of touch with the realities of the war as can be seen with ‘The Little Mother’ letter (p. 188) that Graves wishes to go back to the front becoming incapable of standing England any longer (p. 196). The Armistice comes, but Graves unlike his friend Sassoon, is not happy, all he can do is weep for the dead (p. 228) the trauma is too big, the loss too great the soldiers forever changed by it, the shell shock taking years to overcome the habits f war difficult to let go (p. 235).

Yet,  as mentioned earlier not all was loss, the positive changes came, students for example became interested in studying as opposed to bullying (p. 238), some mistakes are continued by the old generation that sent the young generation to die (p. 202) such as the Treaty of Versailles which appals Graves who vows to live without ever taking orders again (p. 236), traditions of old wane and disappear and yet their memories and the respect they incur don’t such as is the case with ‘Fisher’ Beckley (p. 261). Throughout his memoir Graves gives us a sort of human realism (Thorpe, 1966: 292) charters the changes both personal and social that happen due to the war (Hynes, 1990: 427-31), and through this chart shows us the unreliability of historical ‘facts’ (Fussell, 2000:  216-7), the necessity of dramatisation if one is to achieve some sort of emotional record and how even that is unreliable and ultimately pointless as the cycle of human foolishness and drama continues, ‘new characters appeared on stage’ (Graves, 2000: 279) and on and on. With this work Graves attempts to clean himself of all insincere and insubstantial (Kernowski, 1989: ix), an exorcism of ghosts pasts of sorts from the stage of humankind and its cumbersome past, a lift of weight before pressing on on his journey

REFERENCES

Caesar, A. (1993) Taking it Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets. Manchester: Manchester University Press

Edwards, P. (2005) British War Memoirs. In Sherry, V. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fussell, P. (2000) The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Graves, R. (1960) Goodbye to All That. London: Penguin Books

Hynes, S. (1990) A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. London: Bodley Head.

Thorpe, M. (1966) Siegfried Sassoon A Critical Study. London: Oxford University Press.

Kernowski, F. L. (1989) Introduction. In Kernowski, F. L. (Ed.) Conversations with Robert Graves. Jackson, UA: University Press of Mississippi.

TED HUGHES

Ted Hughes uses myth as a means of exploring the self and society. Myth to him is more than simple symbols of socially construed meaning: they are a link to our inner selves, connecting us to the alienated parts of our psyche. Thus myth is both real and imaginary (Faas, 1980: 49), Mythopoeic writing for Hughes serves a healing function much like Shamanism and its biological inevitability (Hughes, as found in Bentley, 1998: 7), by addressing the divide between man and nature (Faas, 1980: 16), reason and emotion, conscious and subconscious. While by far not representative of his complete works, his Crow sequence has nonetheless much to offer in terms of mythical allusions and Hughes’ implementation of such material.

The Crow, as a character, should be read, or so the author tells us, as a Trickster (Bentley, 1998: 40) is first presented to us in the poem ‘Two Legends’ where he is yet to be born from,

An egg of blackness

Where sun and moon alternate their weather

To hatch a crow, a black rainbow

Bent in emptiness

Over emptiness

But flying

He is to be born in a world of blackness, bent in emptiness and over emptiness, but still the poem ends with an image of flight, an image laden with positive implications. Here we see the positive nature of the Trickster as opposed to Black Comedy as described by Ted Hughes (in Bentley, 1998: 40): both deal with a world void of meaning and utterly damaged and ridiculous, but while Black Comedy has a negative defeatist and bitter point of view, the Trickster is positive, filled with vitality despite all odds. ‘Examination at the Womb-door’, based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead makes a better example of Crow’s nature as both sequence and character: all belongs to death, it is all powerful, ‘But who is stronger then death?’ ‘Me, evidently.’ says Crow, his dogged persistence of life despite death, his intent on flying into the sun and calling it a victory (‘Crow’s Fall’) are exemplary of his immortal underdog status, his victory in attempt. Crow is energy itself, ‘the unkillable urge to keep trying’ (Sagar, 1978: 109). He is also a developing character (p. 110) since he is first born in the sequence from nothingness and no possibility in ‘Lineage’ and from there he embarks on his non-linear quest to attempt to understand ‘the horrors of creation’ (‘Crow Alights’).

Hughes systematically uses myth in order to achieve his desired effect of questioning the established concepts, to debunk reality and show it for its horrifying wasteland of meaning. Crow is therefore steeped in mythology (Sagar, 1978: 105) as he approaches the Judeo-Christian creational myth in ‘A Childish Prank’. Here it is Crow, not God, that breathes life into humankind and he does so in an utterly debasing manner, taking away any sanctity from human existence. It is gloriously vulgar and even funny in a humiliating way with the pun on ‘coming’, but life nonetheless. The next poem of the sequence ‘Crow’s First Lesson’ has God attempting to teach Crow the word love. In his first attempt Crow unleashes a white shark into the sea, in his second a blue fly, a tsetse and a mosquito, in his third and final attempt he has a man’s head become stuck in a woman’s vulva at which ‘God struggled to part them, cursed, wept–’. The omnipotent God of love of Christianity is represented as a weak, incompetent being out of touch with the starkness of existence which Crow, in this poem, represents. God in Crow represents mankind’s idealised misconception of reality, and only by partaking of his dead flesh and coming to terms with the dreadful ‘truth’ can one become stronger, ‘half-illumined’ (‘Crow Communes’).  God is not the only figure that is conjured only to be subverted; ‘Crow’s Account of St George’ invokes the slayer of dragons only to represent him as a mathematical madman that kills his own family by imagining them as monsters. While Oedipus is also invoked to be used as a warning against the inevitability and all encompassing power of death (‘Oedipus Crow’), Ulysses and Hercules are each but nourishment and a miniscule part of Crow respectively, while Beowulf’s hide is used for protection (‘Crowego’) in the same way a cloak would.

God, Adam, Eve, The Serpent, St George, Oedipus, Ulysses, Hercules, Beowulf are all present in order to guide the reader into the mythic subconscious, present at the very root of our psyche (Sagar, 1978:2), and once there rip out its dark underbelly of meaning making, so as to bring its inner workings to the light of consciousness. Under this light one is brought to understand that meaning, be it mythical or linguistic, is a construct having no ‘concrete’ basis in ‘reality’ and can thus be dislodged and manipulated. Its power and effect, however, are more then real, as they directly affect our perception of existence, which is all individuals have since the ‘real’ is forever doomed to be distorted by our looking glasses. Hughes thus does not take language or reality at face value, and neither should the reader (Bentley, 1998: 4). Crow is a character that shows a great divide of meaning, a schism between reality and its representation by human language. His own symbolic meaning is fluid representing at times creative force, humankind, or an abstract embodiment of irony and chaos. He is a paradox in his own right, his existence is absolutely destructive and at the same time deeply creative. Making him quite the nightmare to analyse, his very nature being prone to fly off if one attempts to nail him down to a specific meaning, this creates the effect of keeping readers of the sequence ever adapting and changing their symbolical understanding of him and thus aware of the unreliability, and danger, of a single all encompassing interpretation.

That is not to say that Crow is the only sequence that is enriched by mythological material. It can be said that all of Hughes’ poetry benefits from mythical imagination in some way or another, Crow is in many ways an evolution for Hughes (Faas, 1980: 18) as it has its sources in previous sequences, such as the biblical creation myth poems ‘Theology’ and ‘Logos’ present in Wodwo (1967). God and the serpent are not the only mythical symbols that make reappearances in Crow as such is the case of the Goddess, also know as mother or more simply as nature. While most Crow poems deal with the consciousness (Gifford and Roberts, 1981: 112), the Goddess figure is a fully rounded symbol. It is nature and a natural state in all levels, be it psychological, social or historical, ‘positive’ such as nurturing and life generating, or ‘negative’ such as violence and death. The first appearance of the White Goddess figure in Crow is in the poem ‘Crow’s Undersong’, and it is also its first reappearance since The Hawk in the Rain (1957) (Faas, 1980: 109), although later editions of Crow include other poems such as ‘Crow Tries the Media’ which also can be said to address the Goddess figure. Arguably so does the poem ‘Crow and Mama’ which Faas does not account for, here the mythical mother earth figure is represented as being made to bleed by Crow who also cannot escape her. He stands in this poem for mankind’s inherent destructiveness and creativity. In ‘Crow Tries the Media’ the Goddess is a Muse that cannot be reached due to the distancing of the poet/singer of her through the blunting of his natural sensibilities by civilisation. In the afore mentioned ‘Crow’s Undersong’, Crow sings an elegy for the Gaia figure who ‘cannot count’ and ‘cannot last’. The poem is not without positive notes however as ‘if there had been no hope she would not have come.’ It recognises not only her powerlessness but her power as well since without her, ‘there would have been no city’.

So in Hughes, the mythical Goddess figure represents a nostalgic and Romantic loss of touch with innocence, which becomes a tragic sacrifice as experience and development progress, but it also becomes revered, idolised and forever out of touch. It is the poet’s job to reach out to her despite his jaded sensibilities in order to perform his shamanic duty and heal his people. Yet hers is also the realm of death and completion as she is paradoxically powerless and powerful. Myth is used in Crow as a means of approaching the depths of the human psyche (Bentley: 1998: 6) and from there its sacramental foundation role is constantly demolished (p.42) so as to take the reader in a flight beyond the crashing down of meaning and he consequential wasteland of despair. The nature Goddess, master of the cycles of death and life, is also of interest to another poet, Seamus Heaney. While Hughes uses her in order to explore social and psychological aspects and states of humankind in general broad terms, Heaney approaches her in a more focused manner, by associating her with a very specific land, Ireland.

HEANEY

Heaney’s first four works progressively evolve a myth of his own (Johnston, 1997: 140), a myth of violence and of national and human identity. To understand Heaney’s mythical goddess, we shall first look into ‘The Tollund Man’ poem from his Wintering Out (1972) sequence. In this poem, the narrator, who ‘will stand a long time’, calls himself a ‘bridegroom to the goddess’. She is described as ‘having tightened her torc’ an ‘opened her fen’ upon the Tollund Man figure, ‘Those dark juices working / Him to a saint’s kept body.’ The torc, a ring necklace, quickly associates her with old Celtic culture, while fens, a terrain similar to bogs, associate her with the natural landscape that preserved the body. She is a dark figure, a natural force of death, she denies life (Johnston, 1997: 143); and yet the bog is referred to as ‘our holy ground.’ The Tollund Man, as its avatar, is capable of bringing new life to those who died, capable of making germinate the ‘Stockinged corpses/ Laid out in the farmyards.’ The bog symbol – first applied to its fullness in the ‘Bogland’ poem of his Door into the Dark (1969) as a response to the American myth of the frontier (Mcguinn, 1986: 37) and as an image adequate for the predicament of Northern Ireland (Collin, 2003: 55) – is important because through it Heaney tries to reach into the subconscious of folk memory and explore the relationship of the land with its people (McGuinn, 1986: 38). It is no surprise then that the Goddess becomes intrinsically associated with it as she comes to personify not only nature (Mcguinn, 1986: 90) but Ireland itself in ‘Bog Queen’ from the North (1975) sequence. Here, as the narrator Mother Ireland figure, she is shown to have been waiting for the people that came to populate her; people that, while robbing her, also cause her to rise. She is very important then for what Heaney calls the nationalist myth (Tobin, 1999: 103), but she is also a dark and damaged figure as can be seen in ‘Punishment’, where the poet addressing her says,

I am the artful voyeur

Of your brain’s exposed

And darkened combs,

Your muscles webbing

And all your numbered bones

Mentioning the  ‘betraying sisters’ and ‘tribal, intimate revenge’ adds a political edge to the poem by referring to the situation between Ireland and England and the whole Northern Ireland conundrum.

The goddess, however, is hardly the only mythical figures that Heaney employs. In his controversial North sequence we also have the use of heroic figures of old and other cultures conjured in order to analyse the current situation of Northern Ireland. They are also used to represent man’s nature as he explores the psychological (Johnston, 1997: 140). While attempting to extend his myth (p.145), North has received mixed reviews as many critics object to the historical parallels arguing that both the sheer brutality and the political overtones make the use of myth seem decorative (Tobin, 1999: 104-5). However, that could hardly be the case as myth is essential for the understanding of the piece. The work, being of a self-consciously literary nature, makes use of epic and myth (p. 105) in such a way that its very success as poetry hinges on its use of such material (p.106). The summoning forth of warrior figures is done in order to break away from their romanticised conceptions (Bloom, 2003: 27). The ‘fabulous raiders’ of ‘North’ have rusty swords, ‘The longship’s swimming tongue’ warns the violence inherent ‘in the word-hoard…’ ‘It said Thor’s hammer swung’ for conquering and profit, the poem makes sure to mention all the decidedly unromantic nature of the past, ‘the hatreds and behindbacks’, ‘thick-witted couplings and revenges’, ‘exhaustions nominated peace’, and warns the poet to ‘Compose in darkness.’ It urges the poet to ‘Keep your eye clear / as the bleb of the icicle,’ so as to not idealise this mythical figures and through them introspect our nature as humans (McGuinn, 1986: 92). By bringing forth the Viking origins of Dublin in ‘Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces’ Heaney links them historically with the land and describes them as,

Neighbourly, scoretaking

Killers, haggers

and hagglers, gombeen-men,

hoarders of grudges and gain.

Once again it has the effect of demystification by bringing their mundane and vile aspects to the foreground, taking them closer to the reader, as it were, for inspection. The violent language and overall brutality of the work creates a mythic resonance between the Vikings and the killings in Northern Ireland (Malloy and Carey, 1996: 91), creating a northern myth of violence and suggesting that the killings are rooted in the past and in human nature (Johnston, 1997: 148). In North ,as the violence of both history and myth combine (Tobin, 1999: 104), such violence becomes enlarged and begins to, in the words of ‘Strange Fruit’, ‘to feel like reverence’ so as to represent the inescapable sinister side of man (Johnston, 1999: 145) and nature.

A final example of mythology in Heaney’s poetry comes in the form of ‘Hercules and Antaeus’, the half-giant son of mother earth Gaia and sea god Poseidon, who is defeated by ‘sky-born and royal’ Hercules, son of the Zeus, the thunder god ruler of Olympus, with a mortal. Hercules is associated with light, while Antaeus is associated with darkness in an earlier poem in the sequence eponymously named ‘Antaeus’. Hercules portrayal, however, is not entirely positive as he is described as remorseless. His light is excluding instead of healing and it is due to his victory that, ‘… Balor will die/ and Byrthnoth and Sitting Bull.’  Hercules’ is the force of colonisation and dominant cultures which lifts Antaeus ‘out of his element’ (Tobin, 1999: 109) and subdues him, while dark Antaeus is given the image of nourishment as ‘pap for the dispossessed.’ His defeat is to be mourned by elegists ‘… a dream of loss / and origins…’ The half-giant is a symbol of nature, of the suppressed. His darkness is the darkness of the unconscious mind kept in check by Hercules’ reason or ‘intelligence.’ Their dichotomised nature and the understanding that Hercules himself dies due to an act of passion by his wife Deianira bring forth the idea of one overcoming another (Tobin 1999: 110) in an eternal cycle a yin-yang of light and dark. The poem ends with them still locked in combat reinforcing the idea of a never ending struggle. By exploring the violence in myth and history, Heaney brings forth the concept of the eternal struggle and tries, much like Hughes, to explore and explain the nature of myth and humanity. Through this understanding he attempts to terms with both the nature of humankind and the situation in the Northern Irish society of the time, so that it can begin to heal its traumas (Hart, 1992: 98). His poetry is one that can make one feel ‘lost’  ‘Unhappy’ but also somehow ‘at home’ (‘The Tollund Man’).  Myth in Heaney then is a tool and a means to reach the present situation by approaching it through socially historical established symbols that work at the level of cultural subconscious, the analysis of the creation of myth and its nature is as important to the work as its own historical context, the metaphoric content taking the poems beyond their immediate historical context and giving them a larger depth of meaning creating a mythos of its own and developing a sense of identity both political and human through it.

LARKIN

Larkin’s distrust of myth, allusion and tradition, as announced by the poet himself (O’Neill and Callaghan, 2011: 167), while he admitted that this was perhaps careless on his part,  it does set him apart and against the vast majority of the Western literary tradition: Homer and Virgil and the obviously mythological subject of their epics; Shakespeare and his constant allusions to pagan gods; Milton and his reworking of biblical material; all the way into contemporaries such as Hughes and Heaney. His distrust of myth can be seen as a very bold and presumptuous point of view. Larkin, however, was hardly alone in his breaking away from tradition, as he became to be associated with what came to be called the Movement, a reaction against Neo-Romanticism of the 1930’s calling for a turning to reason and common sense over emotions and mysticism, of restrained ‘low’ rhetoric against over excessively stylised language (Regan, 1992: 13). While hardly a very united group on their stance on Myth, Larkin largely dismisses it claiming to have no interest in the ‘common myth-kitty’ (Larkin in O’Neill and Callaghan, 2011: 168). While his disbelieve in pre-established myths and ‘high’ rhetoric might very well stem from a simple reaction to the over use of classical and biblical allusions (p.167), it is intrinsic of his nature as a decidedly post-war writer (Regan, 1992: 23) with intentions to ground his poetry in the empirical here and now of ‘reality’. Larkin displays an aversion to extremes and foreignness resulted by a giant social trauma caused by the Second World War,  which caused poets like him that matured between the Wars, to become unwilling to engage with ‘whatever is out there’ (Hughes interview in Faas, 1980: 201).

Ironically that brings Larkin to rely on an idealised England of the pre-war period that is, in itself, a mythical construct of nostalgic imagination.  Good examples are his early poem ‘At Grass’ with its ‘classic Junes’ where people were still recognisable from each other, and the slightly more recent poem ‘MCMXIV’ where he gives history itself a mythical treatment (O’Neill and Callaghan, 2011: 165)

Never such innocence,

Never before or since,

As changed itself to past

Without a word – the men

Leaving the gardens tidy,

The thousands of marriages

Lasting a little while longer:

Never such innocence again.

Here with the idea of loss of innocence, we have another version of the myth of the fall of humankind from paradise (O’Neill and Callaghan, 2011: 168). This is the myth about the end of a golden era of perfection, the foreboding ‘Lasting a little while longer’, and the idea of men leaving, immediately brings to the reader the reason of such descent from grace, the War. This idyllic Elysian idea of England in the pre-war era lies at the very heart of most Larkin’s poetry (Heaney, 1997: 29). Movement poets are full of nostalgia and longing for an age preceding the war (p.170), possessed with the idea that they understand the way things are. Most of the initial critic defence of Larkin’s poetry comes with praise of its social realism (Regan, 1992: 9), his constant use of wit and irony makes for a guarded poetry (p. 18) that ranges from the bitter derision of reality to the melancholic acceptance and askance for a healing that it considers impossible. In Larkin’s poetry there is a constant looking at religion as the now dry source of spiritual healing (Whalen, T. A.: 1986: 59). It can be seen in his ‘Church Going’ poem, where the hatless narrator takes off his ‘…cycle-clips in awkward reverence’ and poignantly claims ‘Someone would know: I don’t.’ He thinks the church is not worth stopping forth and ‘Yet stop I did: in fact I often do’. He goes on to muse on the fate of the church when belief finally dies and yet the poem ends with an acknowledgement of the lure of faith and its once held power over humankind,

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

However, the power of the church does not come from the idea of God, but from the fact that people once believed in it. Larkin, with his paradoxical absolute denial of extremism, is confronted with what to put in the place of the now dead God (Motion, 1997: 33) and finds some degree of solace in the familiar natural and common (p. 34) and yet the spiritual void is too great and constantly screams for healing. Nonetheless, Movement poets in their cocksure belief of the superiority of their views of cool logical aloofness become stuck in their urban, academic tendencies generating poems that sometimes are nothing but tame and trivial and resulting thus in a suppression and even rejection of human possibilities for change and development (Regan, 1992: 18-9). Larkin, however, is generally considered to be a deeper poet then his Movement comrades (p.24). While not engaging with myth in a classical fashion in his poetry, Larkin deals with all the major themes of time, death, chance and choice (p.33), baring the mythic body to its bare skeletons. Ironically, to achieve this effect he was forced to create a mythology of himself (Motion, 1997: 50) as ‘Larkin, the myth’, the modernist hater that has nothing to do with mythical metaphors  but whose personal life is mixed with his myth (Tolley, 1991: 1) to such an extent that its hard to tell where one starts and the other ends.

That does not mean that his poems are impossible to read with a mythic frame of mind, only that they are very hard to do so. Some poems lend themselves more easily to mythic interpretation then others such as ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ that, while demythologising the matrimony sacrament with its ‘parodies of fashion’ and ‘uncle shouting smut’, has its journey from the countryside to the city, from innocence to experience, its life journey passing through marriage in one of its many stops. Another example is ‘High Windows’ with its inversed Eden in the beginning where the narrator, by imagining two youngsters having an intercourse, knows that ‘this is paradise’ – its high windows of life looking to the ‘endless’ sky of eternal nothingness. Further examples are the eponymous trees in ‘The Trees’ with their apparent constant Antaeian renewal, and the unbroken eggs of ‘The Explosion’ which all allow themselves to certain levels of highly metaphorical and even mythical reading. It is not that Larkin did not wholly embrace the ideas of the Movement, whose very existence as an art movement was contested by some of its members, of being the art asked for by the masses (Chaterjee, 2006: 103) nor that he did not ultimately attempt to obtain the ‘pure individual experience’ as opposed to inherited cultural convention (Gadd, 1997: 7). Simply it seems impossible to completely run from metaphorical meaning as it is impossible to write in a complete vacuum and it is up to the reader to have the final word on the interpretation of a text. Another kind of myth is that of the expectations of love, which Larkin approaches and explores in several of his poetry (Regan, 1997: 38). Larkin then consciously shuns myth in an attempt to better capture his perception of reality through a logical mindset which generated a generally worldly and easy to follow poetry, but that is at times shallow and lacking in depth with the exceptions of when his mythic and metaphoric subconscious burst through his carefully composed poetry, either intentionally or unintentionally.

CONCLUSION

This work analyses the use of myth by three very different poets, all controversial in their own manners. Firstly, Ted Hughes, with his reworking of biblical and classical material in the controversial Crow, where he attempts to reach the depths of our subconscious and make meaning making clear to our conscious mind. Hughes shows the fluidity of meaning and lack of certainty of life through a somehow positive point of view with his eponymous character. It then looks at Heaney, who explores the nature of political and human identity and its inherent violence, endless cycle of conflict and incongruence through the use of mythic figures such as Thor, Hercules and the goddess. Finally, it analyses Phillip Larkin, who defines himself against the use of myth creating poetry that are as snapshots of life, but becoming embroiled in the subconscious social myths of nostalgic past and incapable of  completely escaping  mythical metaphors such as journeys. Through them we see how myth is an important part of our psyche, comprising our attempts to understand the world around us and weaving themselves into our very subconscious.

REFERENCES

Bentley, P. 1998: The Poetry of Ted Hughes. Hurlow: Addison Wesley Longman.

Bloom, H. (2003) Seamus Heaney. Broomall, PA: Chelse House Publishers

Chaterjee, S. K. (2006) Philip Larkin: Poetry that Build Bridges. New Delhi: Atlantic.

Collins, F. (2003) Seamus Heaney: The Crisis of Identity. Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont Publishing.

Faas, E. (1980) Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press.

Gadd, M. (1997) Myth. London: Routledge

Hart, H (1992) Seamus Heaney: Poet of Contrary Progressions. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Hughes, T. (1972) Crow From the Life and Songs of the Crow. London: Faber and Faber.

Hughes, T. (1995) New Selected Poems 1957 – 1994. London: Faber and Faber.

Johnston, D. (1997) Irish Poetry after Joyce. 2^nd Edition. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Larkin, P. (1989) Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber.

Malloy, C. And Carey, P. (1996) Seamus Heaney: The Shaping Spirit. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press.

McGuinn, N. (1986) Seamus Heaney A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems 1965-75. Leeds: Arnold Wheaton

O’Neill, M. and Callaghan, M. (2011) Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry: Hardy to Mahon. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Regan, S. (1992) The Critics Debate: Philip Larkin. Basingstroke: Macmillan.

Regan, S. (1997) New Casebooks: Philip Larkin. Basingstroke: Macmillan.

Sagar, K. (1978) The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Seamus, H. (1990) New Selected poems 1966-1987. London: Faber and Faber

Tobin, D. (1999) Passage to the Center: Imagination and the sacred in the poetry of Seamus Heaney. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky

Tolley, A. T. (1991) My Proper Ground: A Study of the work of Philip Larkin and its development. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Wagner, J. and Lundeen, J. (1998) Deep Space and Sacred Time: Star Trek in the American Mythos. Connecticut and London: Praeger Publishing.

Whalen, T. A. (1986) Philip Larkin and English Poetry.

William, G. D. (2004) Myth: A Handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press

The general welcome Tamburlaine received

When he arrived last upon our stage

Hath made our poet pen his second part (Prologue, 1-3)

Thus the question arises of whether this second part is an analogous expansion to its predecessor in its overall essence, or perhaps a radically different text in its inherent representation of the same themes.

To answer such a question it is necessary to first ascertain what exactly is depicted to us in the first part of the story of the Scythian shepherd Tamburlaine. Marlowe saw his first foray at play writing in the form of Dido, Queen of Carthage, a play based on Vergil’s epic The Aeneid. As his first play for London theatres, Tamburlaine Part I still heavily engages with the tradition of epic writing, its ‘hero’ Tamburlaine ultimately absolutely controls the play, his martial and ‘manly’ qualities are reminiscent of godlike Achilles and other heroes of the genre. Perhaps more then any other, Tamburlaine reminds us of Hercules (Sinfield, 1999: 114), with whom he is even associated by the reference to one of the tasks performed by his mythical predecessor, taking over Atlas in holding up the celestial sphere (Part I – II.i.10-1), and killing his own children. Yet Marlowe’s eponymous character is anything but continuing the epic tradition, since calling the play’s tyrannous and utterly brutal lead character, which murders and maims without mercy enemies and innocents alike, can hardly be called a hero in the conventional term of the word.

Nevertheless, it is through Tamburlaine, and our reading of him, that the play and its action acquire meaning beyond its immediate representation. While based on a historical person, the 14^th century conqueror Timur the Lame, who like the character termed himself a scourge of god and was ruthless with those that opposed his military might, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is very much its own character. Instead of lame, Marlowe’s description of him seems to give us the picture of an ideal man (Part I – II.i.7-30). Our very first meeting with him happens only after hearing of him through the ineloquent and foolishly pitiful Mycetes, and by so doing Marlowe generates an impression and interest through the opinions of other characters (Simkin, 2001: 10).

When first entering the stage, Tamburlaine is dressed as a shepherd leading on the imprisoned Zenocrate, he then sheds off his ‘mean’ clothing, ‘Lie here, ye weeds that I disdain to wear!’(Part I – I.ii.41) in order to reveal a full set of armour and a curtle-axe. This is Marlowe’s shock tactics at its best much like Barabas’ counting of ‘petty’ money and Faustus’ ritual dismissal of several forms of academic pursuit. It is highly theatrical and designed to impress not only by action, but by the character’s discourse. In Tamburlaine’s case, it is about the nature of power, ‘I am a lord, for so my deeds shall prove’ (Part I – I.ii.34) one cannot deny the impact such words, spoken by a man who admits to being ‘a shepherd by my parentage’ (Part I – I.ii.35) and dressed as such, could have had on an unsuspecting Elizabethan audience.

Subtle is hardly the word that one would use when talking about Marlowe’s ‘heroes’ and Tamburlaine is no exception. He is relentless in his pursuit of power and invincible in combat, and above all, he has the strongest rhetoric in the play. Albeit many of the rulers in the play have a similar violent rhetoric, such as Cosroe and Bajazeth in Part I (Weil, 1977: 14), none can quite match his level of poetic daring and ‘high astounding terms’. He often talks of himself in the third person, much like Barabas in The Jew of Malta and Faustus in Doctor Faustus, and seeks to define himself by his martial accomplishments. ‘This complete armour and this curtle-axe / are adjuncts more beseeming Tamburlaine’ (Part I – I.ii.42-3) is the line when he first names himself. His very identity becomes bound to his weapon and armour, yet he constantly seeks to define himself despite the world around him.

Right at the very beginning Tamburlaine sets out to identify himself as a natural force, as existing separate from his fellow mortal men. He has been, as he tells us, promised the Persian crown at birth by the stars (Part I – I.ii.92) and his conceit only grows bigger as the play progresses. He proceeds to claim power over the wheel of fate and divine protection and sanction from Jove (Part I – I.ii.172-87) to likening himself to Jove (Part I – I.ii.199-201) (Part I – II.vi.52-7). The more power he acquires the grander the claims and yet it is his very rhetoric that brings him more power in the first place, such as the wooing of Theridamas into his service. However, it is his capability of doing good on his promises that firmly sets him on the top of the fortune’s wheel,

Theridamas: You see, my lord, what working words he hath

But when you see his actions top his speech,

Your speech will stay, (…) (Part I – II.iii.25-7)

Oddly foreboding lines, as Cosroe’s speech, whom Theridamas addresses above, will stay upon Tamburlaine’s slaying of him and acquiring the long promised Persian crown,  which commences Tamburlaine’s long and bloody career of slaughtering and conquering. Having come to its possession by betraying and slaying Cosroe, Tamburlaine expounds

Nature, that framed us of four elements

Warring within our breasts for regiment,

Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend

The wondrous architecture of the world,

(…)

Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest

Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,

That perfect bliss and sole felicity,

The sweet fruition of an earthly crown. (Part I – II.vi. 58-69)

Here Tamburlaine remarkably aligns himself with everyman by making ambition natural (Palmer,1968: 163-4) and sets Heaven on earth (Weil, 1977: 115) in order to justify his taking of the crown. Joined together with his common heritage Marlowe then creates a compound figure, an everyman and at the same time a superman blessed by the stars. Upon acquiring his crown, however, Tamburlaine becomes another beast altogether, he becomes the self entitled ‘scourge and wrath of god’ (Part I – III.iii.44)

Yet, for all his talk of divine power, Tamburlaine knows very well that power is changeable. He depends on his reputation with others to hold sway over them – thus his praising of people ‘assets’ above any wealth (Part I – I.ii.241-2) – and on his grim, and sometimes quasi comic, literal implementation of his threats (Mulryme and Fender, 1968: 54) in order to maintain his cult of personality and empower his rhetoric. As he himself puts it, ‘I speak it, and my words are oracles.’ (Part I – III.iii.102).  His absolute refusal to compromise and the likening of himself to a force of nature reach a dramatic peak at the slaughter of the Virgins and citizens of Damascus. Here Tamburlaine is already completely enveloped in his on ceremonies, his megalomania taking new heights as he denies the Virgins pleas of mercy for Damascus and themselves due to their failure to follow his own code of conduct, surrendering before  his tents change from white to black, putting the blame squarely upon them,

They have refused the offer of their lives,

And know my customs are as peremptory

As wrathful planets, death, or destiny. (Part I – V.i.126-8)

He even goes as far as calling Death itself his servant, (Part I – V.i.117). The stage directions tells us that Tamburlaine is ‘all in black, and very melancholy’, yet the fact that it does not stop him from razing the city to the ground and hoisting up the carcasses of the virgins on its walls as a sacrifice and symbol for his cult of personality goes to show that the absolute monster that he is to become in Part II had already had his birth in Part I.

Part I ends with Tamburlaine promising to marry Zenocrate, and to take ‘truce with all the world’, a truce that, as we find out in the very first scene of Part II, has long been abandoned now that he has under his command all of Asia and Africa. This is the part of the tale which should bring forward its full moralisation, being the most important in the saga of a tyrant, for it is, as the prologue kindly points out,

Where death cuts off the progress of his pomp

And murd’rous Fates throws all his triumphs down. (Part II – Prologue. 4-5)

And yet what we get, as usual with Marlowe, is oddly resistant to such a simple pining down of facts. Many of the scenes have matching correspondents of some sort in Part I. For example, once again we first hear of Tamburlaine before seeing him, this followed by a scene where we are introduced to the man himself and all those that side with him.

Tamburlaine is now in the process of grooming his successor from his three sons, despite all his blasphemy against the heavens, he has found no problem in producing heirs. ‘Scourge of god’ has become the very essence of his sense of identity, which is manly formed by repetition of terms (Greenblatt, 2005: 213), he is now so completely drunk on his own cult of personality and divided on the chasm generated by his godlike image and his mortal reality that he will accept no other from his sons,

Be all a scourge and terror to the world,

Or else you are not sons of Tamburlaine. (Part II – I.iii.63-4)

It is here that we are presented with the very first major difference between both plays, a dissenting voice in Tamburlaine’s own camp, the voice of one of his sons no less. Calyphas outright refuses to follow in his father’s footsteps, not seeing the allure in being called a ‘scourge and terror to the world’, while this refusal is nothing fantastical in itself, it is remarkable in the fact that Tamburlaine had enjoyed up to this point absolute control over his followers through his astounding terms, it is the second crack on his almighty persona.

The first change comes in the form of the betrayal of Almeda, who frees Callapine (Part II – I.ii), son of Bajazeth caged and mistreated in Part I, in a scene which brings to mind the wooing of Theridamas into Tamburlaine’s cause. The ‘natural’ ambition of humankind is here working against Tamburlaine for the very first time, and yet it is with the betrayal of another of his servants that Tamburlaine’s claim to omnipotence comes crashing down. This servant is no other then Death, which he once claimed resided at the tip of his sword. The almighty conqueror is powerless in attempting to preserve his beloved Zenocrates’ life, or restore no matter how he rages against the heavens and the underworld. Here his inherent violence takes a new form as he burns a whole town and its inhabitants as a form of morning – violence is now the only way with which he can truly express himself and his new enemy being nature and mortality itself. (Palmer, 1968: 167)

Religion, while always present in the play in the form of invocations to the divine, is brought to the forefront of Part II through the betrayal and consequential defeat of Sigismond, the Hungarian Christian king, who vows in the name of Jesus, not to betray his allegiance with the Muslim Orcanes. Orcanes is intent on attributing it to Christ, his servant Gazellus, however, counters him by bluntly calling it ‘the fortunes of the wars’ (Part II – II.iii.31-)  much like how Theridamas stops Tamburlaine’s angry venting at the heavens,

Ah, good my lord, be patient. She is dead,

And all this raging cannot make her live. (Part II – II.iv.119-20)

The sense of the unresponsiveness of the heavens to prayers and pleas permeates both plays with ‘sleepy Mohamet’ never answering the despairing Bajazeth or the demands of the grief stricken Tamburlaine. Our once Scythian shepherd however attempts his own hand at religion in order to immortalize himself through his violence (Greenblatt, 2005: 197) such as the burning of the village aforementioned, his ceremonial wounding of himself for the indoctrination of his sons, his purging of his heretical son Calyphas through murder, his creation of his symbol of violence and power; the chariot led by his conquered enemies instead of horses, much like the cross is the symbol of Christ’s suffering. Last but not least, his outright defiance of Islam by the burning of the Qur’an and taunting of Mahomet, after which he is mysteriously struck by a disease which leads to his death.

Although an audience or reader of the play might want to interpret his death as divine retribution (Simkin, 2001: 85) by a heathen god, as far as Elizabethan playgoers and readers were concerned, the fact remains that not once is his death mentioned in the play in terms of divine retribution. It is only attributed to ‘the monarch of the earth’ Death (Part II – V.v.216-23). Tamburlaine, however invincible in battle, is only mortal and not a god and strives to endure in the spirit of his followers and, most importantly, of his sons, but this is only psychological placebo, ‘for Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die.’

Both plays are thus incomplete without each other. Part I is an unashamed monument to the power of ambition and human life lived to its utmost, with Tamburlaine being quasi equivalent to an elemental force that meets no equal and whom through the sheer force of his will and ruthlessness builds an empire for himself and acquires the woman he loves. Part II – through its consistent undermining of the achievements and godlike image of Tamburlaine, dissenting voices, such as Calyphas, and the blooming of the seeds planted in Part I - is an statement of the ephemeral and corruptive nature of power and the existential truth of mortality (Mulryme and Fender, 1968: 56). Without a rise there

REFERENCES

Greenblatt, S. (2005) Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Marlowe, C. (2003) Tamburlaine The Great Part I. In Romany, F. and Lindsey, R. (eds) Christopher Marlowe The Complete Plays. London: Penguin Books.

Marlowe, C. (2003) Tamburlaine The Great Part II. In Romany, F. and Lindsey, R. (eds) Christopher Marlowe The Complete Plays. London: Penguin Books.

Mulryme, J. R. and Fender, S. (1968) Marlowe and the ‘Comic Distance’. In Morris, B. (ed.) Mermaid Critical Commentaries Christopher Marlowe. London: Ernest Benn Limited.

Palmer, D. J. (1968) Marlowe’s Naturalism. In Morris, B. (ed.) Mermaid Critical Commentaries Christopher Marlowe. London: Ernest Benn Limited.

Simkin, S. (2001) Marlowe The Plays. Basingstroke: Palgrave.

Sinfield, A. (1999) Legitimating Tamburlaine. In Wilson, R. (ed.) Longman Critical Readers Christopher Marlowe. Harlowe: Addison Wesley Longman.

Weil, J. (1977) Christopher Marlowe Merlins Prophet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1719, is almost a universal title. Its reach extends so far and wide that even those who are not English native speakers and have not read the novel have some knowledge of the titular character and his desolate island ordeal. The figure of the man with the goat skin clothes starring at the beach, heavily armed with guns and with a naked sword at his side make an impression on the imagination of all those who came into contact with it in one form or another. Its reach and status is such that it was widely considered during Victorian times to be the best book one could give a child for its imaginative power and ‘good’ morals, being canonised by many as a timeless masterpiece with no boundaries. Yet, Robinson Crusoe is the product of a very specific time in British history; better yet, it was a product of a particular individual in a very specific historical context.

This paper will briefly describe the historical context at the time of the book’s publication. It will then analyse the different aspects of Defoe’s view of religion, politics, and economics in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and examine how they surface in the novel.  Concluding upon the contradictions and  enduring nature of this text.

1. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Stable would hardly be the word used to describe the England of Defoe’s time. He was born to a Presbyterian dissenting family in London, around the time of the restoration of Charles II to the throne after a decade of power in the hands of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans (Novak, 2003:11-2). Being barred from having a classical education, he was sent to Charles Morton’s dissenting academy. The ideas imparted by his tutor would later influence his writings. There he received a more progressive education, which focused mainly on English, discourse and science, at the expense of the more orthodox Greek and Latin education. Defoe during his youth also received education in order to become a dissenting minister, which he turned away from, becoming a merchant like his father instead. His faith, however, was central to his life and would continue to be so to the very end. This fact led him to join the failed Monmouth Rebellion against the Catholic King James II, from which he barely escaped alive. He also staunchly supported the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which installed the good, in Defoe’s eyes, Protestant King William III.

Being a simple merchant was not enough for the brilliant and self assured dissenter of strong opinions. Much like his character that would try to rise ‘faster then the nature of the thing admitted’ (Defoe, 1995:28) and infected with the ‘plague of mankind’ ‘of not being satisfied with the station wherein God and Nature has placed them’ (1995:149) Defoe involved himself with several different investments and ended up acquiring an enormous amount of debt, being once imprisoned due to it in 1692. It is no surprise then that one of his first publications of notice An Essay upon Projects (1697) was a treatise on different plans and projects for the economic improvement of the nation. Economics would be ever present in his mode of thought, as can be seen in the evil versus good ‘book keeping’ that he has Crusoe use to explain his thought of being stranded in the island (1995:50).

That, however, would not be the only time Defoe would enjoy the comforts of prison, the second time being of a much more serious nature. As religion and politics were hardly separate at the time, Defoe’s interest on the former, coupled with his economic interest, made it nigh to impossible for him not to have been also interested on the latter. Being present at the time of the political division in parliament between the High Church Tories, who supported monarchical absolutism and the Stuarts, and the Low Church Whigs, with their constitutional monarchical ideas backing the Hanoverians, Defoe was right in the middle of the political storm. Producing political pamphlets siding mostly with the side of the Dissenter friendly Whigs, he landed himself in big trouble with the anonymously published The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1703). In it Defoe alleged ironically parodied the Tory rhetoric against the Dissenters. The final product, however, was so good a mimicry that some thought it to be genuine, and those that did see the irony were so disturbed by the content (Novak, 2008: 28) that a hunt for the author was ordered by Queen Anne. Made to stand on the pillory and imprisoned, Defoe was short on allies, being considered ‘a traitor’ by the Whigs and ‘a seditious writer’ by the Tories. He was freed by ex-Whig-turned-Tory Robert Harley and put to work as a propaganda agent (Novak, 2003: 205-6) and later even become a spy.

Politics would then dominate most of his life, although trade would never stop being a driving issue in his writing (Schonhorn, 1991:141). His allegiances were fluid at best with him writing both for and against the government in power. He constantly found writing outlets for his own views. That is not to say that these views were the same throughout his life (Novak, 2003:5). Becoming deeply connected with the centre of power would show him the dark underbelly of its own workings, generating no small amount of despair in the more optimistic minded Defoe (Novak, 2003:513). His views on his own society started to morph. Such was his situation upon his writing of Robinson Crusoe. Having gone through many a different profession, from merchant to journalist to spy, he was a man of progressive ideas. He had very progressive views on slavery (Novak, 2003: 527) and the education of women, and this would show in the very narrative style of his most famous novel.

2. TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

Told as a first person narrative by the supposed author Robinson Crusoe of York, Defoe pronounced himself as only editor. The work was groundbreaking in its use of realism in fiction, to the point that many believed it to be of non-fictional nature. The production of didactic biographies being in vogue at the time most probably added greatly to that effect. Defoe himself most probably drew inspiration from Puritan spiritual autobiographies (Schonhorn, 1991:142). He defends the publication of his fantastical story in his editorial preface,

The story is told with modesty, with seriousness and with a religious application of events to the uses to which wise men always apply them (viz.) to the instruction of others by this example, and to justify and honour the wisdom of Providence in all the variety of our circumstances, let the happen how they will.

The editor believes the thing to be a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it. And however thinks, because all such things are dispatched, that the improvement of it, as well to the diversion as to the instruction of the reader, will be the same; and as such he thinks, without farther compliment to the world, he does them a great service in the publication.

From this we can gather that, firstly, as other Puritans of his time, Defoe was a pragmatist (Rees, 1996: 73) who really believed he had a message to pass on for the general advancement of humankind. Secondly, that Defoe had no qualms in using deceit in order to please the crowds. Fiction at the time was considered to be a lesser form of literature and even regarded by Puritans as glorified lies, confronting their strict religious morals. His experience as a journalist gave him insights into what would draw in the crowds, hence the sensationalist title The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un‐inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. An even more scandalous title would appear in his other novel, Moll Flanders published in 1722.

It could be concluded, by examining his life, that Defoe was a man who, like his character, lived a very varied life and who had very prominent views as well as a desire to make humanity see things as he did. It is no wonder then that Robinson Crusoe is shot through with religious, moral, political and economical ‘lessons’. His views are ever present in his work, whether he was conscious of it or not, which I believe he mostly was. First we should analyse how Defoe weaves and leads the reader to associate with the eponymous character. Being the narrator Crusoe completely dominates the narrative, all is filtered through him and indeed almost everything in the novel carries his comments. It is also important to notice that these comments come not from the subject at the moment of the action, but from the reminiscing Crusoe that gives us the narrative from a hindsight perspective. Actually, we are presented with two Crusoes, one who is subject of the action and the other who is its teller.

2.1 Religion

Crusoe the narrator presents himself as a pious and repenting man, who commentates upon the mistakes of his youth and it is him who gives many of the more obvious moral messages of the book, such as the trust in the Divine Providence. He also endeavours to tint our understanding of Crusoe the subject. One of the ways he does this is by largely insinuating that that which he calls his ‘original sin’, his design to ramble the world, is largely due to predestination,

(…) but I would be satisfied with nothing but going to sea; and my inclination to this led me so strongly against the will, nay, the commands, of my father, and against all the entreaties and persuasions of my mother and other friends, that there seemed to be something fatal in that propension of nature tending directly to the life of misery which was to befall me. (Defoe, 1995:1) (My italics)

The narrator continues to influence the reader’s perception of young Crusoe throughout the novel. This is illustrated by every episode in which Crusoe could have supposedly turned back and avoided his fate of being stranded on the desert island, such as when he continued his travels after the second storm (Defoe, 1995: 9). This influence is exerted to such an extent that the reader is left in doubt whether Crusoe is ever truly rebellious against God’s will or only following his allotted part in God’s divine plan (Hammond and Regan, 2006: 65). The passage above also depicts another narrative device which leads us to sympathise with young Crusoe; he is often associated with biblical figures such as, in this case, the Prodigal Son and Jonah (Carroll and Prickett, 1998). These biblical references can be seen as Crusoe’s attempt to compensate for his flawed life (Baines, 2007: 57) or just as a simple manifestation of Defoe’s spirituality and the nature of the times (Novak, 2003: 541). While both hypotheses may be true, it could be suggested that these references are also a tool for Defoe to familiarise his readership with his character, by using a common background that they would already share, and thus making Crusoe a more easily embraceable character.

Religion is one of the major themes of the novel without a doubt. The constant emphasis of the narrator upon young Crusoe’s lack of religion (e.g. Defoe, 1995: 59), and his disregard for the Providence as the cause for his ‘fall’, might be considered as one of the main points of the novel. Yet, Robinson Crusoe is much more complex than that. The stress is, however, upon the nature of a true believer and of worship. For Defoe it is not enough to follow the teachings of the Bible, it is necessary to truly commune with God upon reflection of his Word and everyday Providence in deference to his Divine Will in one’s life. In Crusoe’s world social interaction, especially with the wrong kind of people, is a strongly corrupting force, as can be seen by the description of his failure to heed Providence after both storms. After the first storm, a punch bowl with the sailors makes him forget all sober thoughts of returning to his father (Defoe, 1995: 6). After the second one shame of being socially ridiculed keeps him from going back to his community (Defoe, 1995: 11). Crusoe even comments on the corrupting factor of company himself,

I had, alas! No divine knowledge; what I had received by the good instruction of my father was then worn out, by an uninterrupted series, for eight years of seafaring wickedness, and a constant conversation with nothing but such as were, like myself, wicked and profane to the last degree. (Defoe, 1995: 67)

Here the idea that man is affected by his environment, professed by Defoe’s early teacher Charles Morton (Novak, 2003: 48), can be seen. Also present are the Calvinist ideas of predestination and election (Calvin, 2008: 606-613). Why is Crusoe the only of such degenerate and wicked sailors to survive his shipwreck? The simple answer would be that he is chosen by God. His struggle to reach shore is much like that of a newborn to come into life; its rises and falls, pushes and shoves of the waves (Defoe, 1995: 33-4) represent Crusoe’s rebirth into a state where he has no choice but to contemplate and repent in his solitude. This solitude accords to the Puritan notion of the individuality of faith and of being isolated in a corrupting world (Egan, 1973: 453). Present also are the notions of High and Low Church of the Whig and Tory factions respectively. Crusoe and, in this case also Defoe, clearly side with the Low Church, which states that there is no need of a medium between the believer and God. This can be seen on his attempt to teach the Scripture to Friday in order to deepen his understanding of the Word,

I believe that all that act upon the same will find, that in laying things open to him, I really informed and instructed myself in many things that either I did not know, or had not fully considered before, (Defoe 1995: 169)

His religion becomes his link with sanity and salvation, and yet it just leads to his rescue from the Island and only truly reaches its potential for good in the midst of society (Rees, 1996: 87). However, Crusoe is first led into his redemption and future piety through a series of further Providential occurrences, for so he deems to call them, such as the appearance of the stalks of barley and wheat, the earthquake and his dream with the fiery angel of retribution (Defoe, 1995: 60-8). Defoe, nonetheless, is also careful to leave perfectly reasonable explanations for them, such as the shaking of the bag of poultry feed, a simple geological occurrence and a feverish dream fuelled by a guilty conscience. The hand of the Providence, Crusoe argues, is in the sequence of the events, as can be seen in his marking of the days and the matching dates (Defoe, 1995: 102). Ironically, however, he misses count of a couple of days (Defoe 1995: 79), therefore misnaming Friday.

Another Calvinist theory that is up for contest in Defoe’s work is that of Total Depravity. Although it is not as extreme as rendering all humans as naturally depraved, Defoe recognizes that the main force that drives humans, especially in politics and economics, is self-interest (Novak, 2003: 513-5), which he sees as being a natural characteristic of humankind (Rees, 1996: 95). And yet Crusoe, meets with both utmost kindness and extreme fealty in many parts of his journey, such as the Moor boy Xury, the Portuguese captain, the English widow, and, not least of all, ‘his man’ Friday. Interesting to notice is that they all come from different backgrounds, a Muslim, a Catholic, a Protestant woman, and finally a savage and man eater. Defoe’s optimism in mankind shines through, even if only a little, as Crusoe finds good people and human charity in the most unlikely of places.  Crusoe goes on to expose on the equality between races and the fairness of God’s providence,

He has bestowed upon them the same powers, the same reason, the same affections, the same sentiments of kindness and obligation, the same passions and resentments of wrongs, the same sense of gratitude, sincerity, fidelity, and all the capacities of doing good, and receiving good, that He has given us;(…) And this made me very melancholy sometimes, in reflecting, (…) why it has pleased God to hide the like saving knowledge from so many million of souls, who if I might judge by this poor savage, would make a better use of it than we did. (Defoe, 1995: 160-1)

He even allows himself to admit Friday as the better Christian between the two of them upon the ‘good’ savage’s conversion (Defoe, 1995: 169). Progressive as such views may be at the time, the concept of the superiority of the European society is still present through the mentioned ‘saving knowledge’ and the ‘powers enlightened by the great lamp of instruction’ (Defoe, 1995: 161). These refer not only to the knowledge of God but also cultural and technological advancement. Of the latter it is interesting to point out its appearance of godlike power to the still ignorant Friday that ‘would have worshipped me and my gun’ (Defoe, 1995: 162). It is also the tools of his own civilisation that Crusoe salvages from his ship (Defoe, 1995: 36), which keep him from degenerating into a savage state and having to gnaw at the skin and meat of his prey with his teeth and bare hands. It is his cultural heritage that leads him to be capable of transforming the island from a desolate place of nature into a place of possible comfort.

Another item Crusoe takes from his wrecked ship is money, which he remarks as useless and as a drug, and considers leaving it where it stands for it not being worth saving. Ironically, though, he still decides to take it with him (Defoe, 1995: 43). While Defoe might have meant for that to be an exposition of Lockean ideas of value theory (Tully, 1994: 616-652), it does not change the fact that Crusoe brings with him the capitalism mode of thinking to his newfound colony. Defoe uses the desert island situation to explore how the complexity of production of something as basic as bread (Defoe, 1995: 90) is overlooked in a capitalist society, such as 18^th century England. Crusoe is an exemplary worker never keeping to idleness (Defoe, 1995:88), and constantly labouring for his survival and for the little comfort he is to have. He frequently explains in great detail the great pains which he has to go through, which not only adds to the realism of the fiction but also works as a moral lesson for the readers who should better appreciate the little comforts of their lives and the fruits of hard work.

2.2 Politics and economics

The concept of property is also explored and through it the right of kings over their territory. This is illustrated by Crusoes’s right of possession of his Edenic Island (Defoe 1995: 76), his proclamation that he had no competitors (Defoe 1995: 98), and his belief that he had absolute power over his animal servants, with not ‘a rebel among them’ (Defoe 1995: 113).  Defoe also uses the metaphor of animals as subjects in order to expound on the nature of a good government, as can be seen in Crusoe’s kind treatment of the she goat which is repaid with loyalty (Defoe 1995: 86). Further examples are his protection of his crop from enemies by using his dog; the punishment and example making of the fowls, ‘as we serve notorious thieves in England’ (Defoe 1995: 89). His keeping of the tame goats from the wild by enclosing them in order to stop them from breaking in and breaking out (Defoe 1995:112), could also be seen as an approval of prisons or clearly defined borders. Upon acquiring human subjects he then comments that he allows freedom of worship in his domains (Defoe 1995: 185). While highly unusual, this can be explained by the fact that Defoe was originally a merchant and to exclude other religions is counter-productive, as it limits your target market, making it, in the long term, irrational (Hill, 1980: 11).

Reason and long term thinking are key words of wisdom for Defoe. In stark contrast to these principles is Crusoe’s lack of foresight, evident in his creation of his first canoe, which took him nearly 5 months to complete and which he was unable to move (Defoe 1995: 97-8). Defoe sees reason as a tool to ascertain truth and keep one’s mind in perspective, as can be seen in Crusoe’s reasoning upon his miraculous survival of the ship wreck (Defoe 1995: 47). From this point of view, it is true that self-interest and kindness and religious faith can be reconciled with each other. It is in the name of self interest that Crusoe saves Friday from his pursuers,

It came now very warmly upon my thoughts, and indeed irresistibly, that now was the time to get me a servant, and perhaps a companion or assistant, and that I was called plainly by providence to save the poor creature’s life. (Defoe 1995: 155)

This reconciliation extends to Crusoe’s treatment of Friday, as it is in the Englishman’s interest not to have a subjugated slave who might kill and eat him in his sleep, even though subjugation might be easier and faster to achieve. Thus he endeavours to educate and convert Friday into a servant who is grateful and obedient to him (Defoe 1995: 166-170), transforming the savage into ‘his man Friday’ who would gladly lay down his life for his master. This could represent Defoe’s views not only of slavery, but also of the treatment of England’s colonies. Other acts of kindness repaid are those of the English widow and the captain, who are eventually paid by Crusoe for their good treatment of him. The boy Xury, however has as his reward being sold to slavery by young Crusoe, a fitting example of the kind of thinking that would inform Defoe’s later novel Moll Flanders (Novak, 1964: 198-204). The opposition between man’s natural instincts of self-preservation and the divine law, as well as how upon starvation and need any kindness and faith are soon forgotten, are quite explicit in the speech of the Spaniard Crusoe rescues (Defoe 1995: 189).

The idea of self-preservation is present throughout Robinson Crusoe, evident in the main character’s fear of wild beasts upon his arrival on the island, which leads to his utmost effort to create a secure habitation or his ‘castle’ (Defoe 1995: 118). It is also manifest in his unwillingness to take kindness for granted, demanding contracts and oaths of those he saves but would do him no harm, (Defoe 1995:188, 196). Fear is a powerful force. Crusoe’s finding of a single foot print in the sand, (Defoe 1995: 117-8) has him ‘thunderstruck’ and exercises a terrible strain on his very imagination, so much so that he even considers it being Satan’s. The narrator, however, tells us that the confrontation of fear is also the key to deliverance,

The evil in which itself we seek most shun, and which, when we are fallen into it, is the most dreadful to us, is oftentimes the very means or door to our deliverance, by which alone we can be raised again from the affliction we are fallen into. (Defoe, 1995: 139)

The safeguarding of his life is aided as well by special providences that manifest themselves upon the mind of Crusoe, aiding him in times of need (Defoe 1995: 134, 192). Those not particularly religious might also call it ‘gut feeling’. Defoe having been a spy and having been forced to write propaganda for those that were once his enemies, must have been all too aware of the importance of the survival instinct.

CONCLUSION

On the one hand, we have the image of both Crusoe as the everyman, a simple young man of York subject to the works of the Providence and the whims of nature, possessed of a desire to see the world. He is not proficient in any form of skill, instead he is a person anybody could easily substitute themselves for (Coleridge, 1936: 300). On the other hand we have the image of the pious repenting and wiser narrator who guides our reading of the story. That is not to say that the Crusoe narrator is the embodiment of Defoe’s ideals and thus a simple extension of himself under a different name, no matter how many biographical and ideological similarities they may share. Defoe, as can be seen both in his journalistic writings, such as The Shortest-way with The Dissenters, as in his other novels, such as Moll Flanders, was a master at imitating and creating different voices quite different from each other as well as from his own, although arguably still carrying his morals.

Therefore Crusoe is not without his ironies. He abandons his colony and exercises almost no function in its keeping. He exercises almost no responsibilities towards his territory, but keeps the title of Governor and continually refers to it as his island. He treats women as commodities of trade sending them to the island upon his return visit (Defoe 1995: 235). Despite constantly mentioning his ‘original sin’ of having a wandering spirit and claiming repenting, he once more endeavours to travel the world by the end of the book. Furthermore, despite professing melancholy at the thought that the savages did not receive the ‘light of God’ when the opportunity presents itself to him of being the agent of its propagation alongside Friday, he proclaims that the thought had never crossed his mind and that he had no desire to do spread the Word of God among the pagans (Defoe 1995:174). He mostly deals with people in a gain versus loss mentality instead of actively engaging with them emotionally. A grim example of his cold capitalist thinking is his book keeping of death, where he calculates the murders of the Caribbs carried out by himself and his people much like one would do their grocery list (Defoe 1995: 182). That Defoe did not mean this ironies consciously is possible, however unlikely, as no man is without contradictions within himself.

On Robinson Crusoe Defoe gives us a time capsule of his ideals and criticisms of his time conflicting and complimenting each other on a wide variety of subjects such as politics, religion, economics and even psychology. His account is complete yet incomplete, leaving us with a ‘perhaps’ more to come; it is congruent yet incongruent, topical of its time and timeless in its treatment of its topics; it is realist yet allegorical; divine and mundane by treating in its span both the salvation of the soul and the details of creating a flat board with minimal tools. It is pure fiction and yet reeks of truth and, most of all, while constantly appealing to the reason of the reader, incites and excites his imagination generating a power and life of its own.

REFERENCES

Baines, P. (2007) Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe/ Moll Flandes. A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Calvin, J. (2008) Institutes of the Christian Religion. Boston, MA: Hendrickson Publishers.

Carroll, R. and S. Prickett (eds) (1998). The Bible: Authorized King James Version. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Coleridge, S. T. (1936) Coleridge’s miscellaneous criticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Defoe, D. (1995) Robinson Crusoe. London: Wordsworth Classics.

Egan, J. (1973) Crusoe’s Monarchy and the Puritan Concept of the Self. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 13/3, pp. 451-460.

Hammond, B. and S. Regan (2006) Making the Novel. Fiction and Society in Britain, 1660-1789. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Hill, C. (1980) Robinson Crusoe. History Workshop, 10, pp. 6-24

Novak, M.  E. (1964) Conscious Irony in Moll Flanders: Facts and Problems. College English, 26, pp.198-204.

Novak, M. E. (2003) Daniel Defoe. Master of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Novak, M. E. (2008) Defoe’s political and religious journalism. In Richetti, J (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rees, C. (1996) Utopian Imagination and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. London: Longman.

Schonhorn, M. (1991) Defoe’s Politics. Parliament, Power, Kingship, and Robinson Crusoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tylly, J. (1994) Locke. In Burns, J.H. and M. Goldie (eds) The Cambridge History of Political thought, 1450-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

I am glad at soul I have no other child,

For thy escape would teach me tyranny, (Othello I.iii.195-6)

Power, albeit be it political, gendered or otherwise, has been a matter of utmost importance for humanity since ancient times. For all relationships, from the openly social, such as a monarch’s to his servants, to the most private, such as in a family, always hinge on a delicate balance of power and influence. It is no surprise then to see matters such as the nature and abuse of power to show up in literature, much less surprising to see it on the works of the author considered by many to be the greatest to have ever graced us with his work in the English language. It is the objective of this essay to look into the political and historical context of Elizabethan England, and analyse the treatment of tyranny, monarchical or otherwise, and also examine the quite opposite republicanism, as well as the characters that embody power and its abuse in Shakespeare’s plays Othello and The Winter’s Tale.

Shakespeare’s time was a time of great political changes and disturbances; while England prospered under its Virgin Queen, it was also a time when the Crown had acquired powers far beyond those of its predecessors. With Henry VIII’s Reformation, the Sovereign became also the head of the English Church and came to hold religious as well as secular powers. It then became a great preoccupation for the courtiers at the time what exactly was the limit of the monarch’s power. How could the people and the Parliament protect themselves in case a tyrant came to the throne? Considering that the Sovereign could now claim divine rights and powers, disobedience and revolt were become not only crimes but also mortal sins.

Such discussions reawakened, not surprisingly, questions on the nature of a tyrant. What was it that separated a good and godly king from this most foul of creatures? These concerns were not only England’s, as works such as Erasmus’ (1516) The Education of a Christian Prince, highly influential in its time, show. Erasmus deliberates on how a good Prince should behave and on how to be ‘a good Monarch’ as opposite to ‘the scourge of nations’ that was ‘a wicked and evil prince’ (cited in Wells, 2009: 90-1). Another work on the subject, translated into English in 1606, was that of the French thinker Jean Bodin (1576) The Sixe Books of a Commonweale (cited in Wells, 2009: 104-6) which sets out to draw a contrast between a king and a tyrant, the former as a selfless ruler steeped in law, and the second as selfish and the follower of his own lusts, appetites and fears.

Another aspect of a bad monarch, according to Bodin (cited in Wells, 2009: 104-6), is that he does not listen to his wise counsellors or quite simply has none, them being as wicked as he. This facet of the prototypical tyrant came to really bear on English minds with the coronation of James VI of Scotland as James I of England, infamous for his views on the divine right of kings and his denial of parliamentary power. He insisted that kings were to submit to no laws but God’s and the ancient customs, and above all that the Parliament had no right to tell him how to perform his kingly duties, as can be seen on his own work on the matter The True Law of Free Monarchies (1996). This is not to say that James I was a tyrant, only that his unwillingness to heed to parliament was a matter of great concern. However, even if the king of England was not a tyrant, Shakespeare’s Leontes, from The Winter’s Tale, most probably written during James I’s reign, is a different matter. A good natured king, he turns into tyrant, as can be seen in his failure to heed to Camillo, and later to his council and Paulina, as the former pleads Hermione’s innocence to his king,

Leontes: Say it be, ‘tis true.

Camillo: No, no, my lord.

Leontes: It is. You lie, you lie.

I say thou liest, Camillo, and I hate thee, (I.ii.300-3)

Leontes turns irrational at the thought of her adultery, incapable of discerning sound counselling or even reality anymore, as can be seen at his misrecognition of his son Mamillius, (I.ii.127-163), first as not his, and then as he himself. He goes forth then to denounce Hermione publicly as an adulteress, much to the distress of his council, which protests her innocence. Leontes’ reply to them closely resonates with James I’s views on the powers of kingship,

Why, what need we

Commune with you of this, but rather follow

Our forceful instigation? Our prerogative

Calls not your counsels, but our natural goodness

Imparts this; which, if you – or stupefied

Or seeming so in skill – cannot or will not

Relish a truth like us, inform yourselves

We need no more your advice. The matter,

The loss, the gain, the ord’ring on’t, is all

Properly ours. (II.ii.163-72)

However James I is not the only monarch that Leontes can be associated with. As Palmer (1995: 331) shows in his essay, it is possible to link him to the notorious tyrant Ivan IV of wintery Russia. The connection can be made not only through his cruelty, committing the newborn baby and his wife to the fire (II.iii.95-6), but also through Hermione’s admittance that, ‘The Emperor of Russia was my father.’(III.ii.117) and even having in mind the bear scene that marks the end of the tragedy part of the play, at the end of the third part of the third act.

Leontes is, thus, overcome with what Paulina calls ‘tyrannous passion’ (II.iii.37) and which causes him to even ignore the gods which profess to him his wife’s innocence (III.ii.131-8). He only comes to his senses when the oracle’s prediction of the death of his son comes to pass. Leontes however is far from being Shakespeare’s only tyrannical ruler; another quite clearer case can be seen in his Richard II, with the titular character making for a quite more stereotypical tyrant. The other play pertaining to this essay, Othello, is not so clear on the subject, and yet its once good moor, Othello, has much more in common with repenting king Leontes then Shakespeare’s Richard II.

Othello’s converted moor protagonist however is no king, being introduced to us as a commander under the Venetian government. The city is also present in another play, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello’s affiliation with Venice speaks wonders of Shakespeare’s view of the city, its government, and its humanist myth (Slights, 1997: 380) of valuing its citizens on merit and dealing equally and fairly with all. The signory, the government of the city, while only briefly present in the play, is shown to be a place of discussion, where discourse is heard to its fullest from both sides and only then considered and replied to (I.iii.1-292), drawing a stark contrast between its workings and the workings of Leontes’ court in his jealous rage.

Othello, however, is no tyrant per se. He does have a certain leader’s charisma (Hattaway, 2006: 116) and becomes governor of Cyprus, and it is there were he does injustice to his wife. Yet he commits his crime by his own hand, making abuse of his power as a husband but not as governor, unlike Leontes, who orders his servants to do it for him. Also contrasting with Leontes, who comes to his belief about his cuckoldry on his own accord, Othello has ‘honest’ Iago spurring him on and directing his thinking until he eventually becomes overcome with his ‘tyrannous hate’ (III.iii.453). His attempt to associate his murder of Desdemona with religious righteousness can lead him to be associated with his enemy, the Turk, and their cruel sultans (Vitkus, 1997: 171), much like Leontes can be associated with the Russian tyrant.

Both men are shown to us as good people, respectable and honourable, Othello arguably more then Leontes. Both are married to the fairest and purest of wives, and out of jealousy aroused by their supposed infidelity are led to tyrannical behaviour. Therefore, it is not their first nature to abuse their power, but this is a consequence of their emotions growing swelled and overcoming their reason, leading them to go against their better judgement and not heed those of others. Such a tyrannical behaviour affects even The Winter’s Tale other, and arguably better, king, Polixenes (Kurland, 1991: 375)  who, upon his discovery of his son’s plan to marry without his consent, imposes extreme punishment to all involved (IV.iv.405-29) and ‘will allow no speech’ (IV.iv.456). Yet, Shakespeare’s intent is hardly to give lessons on how monarchs should behave or which system of government is superior; his interest is in the drama of power (Wells, 2009:89) and its affect on the character of those who hold it.

While some characters in Shakespeare’s plays, mostly marginal ones, are two dimensional, his lead characters often show incredible depth when closely analysed. That is doubly true in the case of his tragedies, and Othello is no different. The protagonist is a moor, a black man in the middle of a white society, whose whole sense of self depends upon his reputation which makes him ‘white’ -  a reputation he cannot bear to see ‘blackened’ by his wife’s infidelity,

I will have some proof. My name that was fresh

As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black

As mine own face. If there be cords, or knives,

Poison, or fire, or suffocating streams,

I’ll not endure it. Would I were satisfied! (III.iii.391-5)

His whole identity is constructed by the norms and language of a society to which he is an outsider (Greenblatt, 2005: 245). He must constantly be the gallant whitened moor. Add to that his insecurity over being black, rustic, ageing, satisfying and possessing his beloved wife’s appetites (III.iii.267-274) and you have a very fragile sense of self, that coupled with power and authority make for an extremely volatile mix, as can be seen by the play’s tragic conclusion. Not only that, it also causes his focus to be completely upon himself causing his engagement with his wife to become separated from reality. His idolisation and love of her come to define his sense of self, and thus become separate from the real. It heightens his fear of loss and degradation of her person too such an extreme level that leads him to hate her living, supposedly infected self, and love her constructed image of purity. It is this contradiction within himself that causes his outburst of violence, ‘Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee / and love thee after.(…)’ (V.ii.18-9)

A divided sense of self can also be found in Leontes, a fact that is most aptly noticed by his counsellor Camillo,

(…) one

Who in rebellion with himself, will have

All that are his so too. (…) (I.ii.355-7)

While Leontes is not as complex as Othello – for example, he does not have an issue with being of a different colour then those around him – he is a king that is faced with his own mortality. He looks upon his son and fondly remembers days past (I.ii.152-161), and he is aware of his aging (II.iii.162). The same can be said for Polixenes on the second part of the play (IV.iv.385-9). Fuelled by Hermione’s behaviour with Polixenes, which is only partly available to us and him, (Felperin, 1999: 189) Leontes also suffers a fear of loss and idolatry of his wife. It leads him to misrecognise her as a full and independent being (Danson, 1994: 77). He comes to hate the living Hermione and idolises the image of the dead one.  His biggest fear, however is to lose that which gives him his power: reputation. This can be seen in his wild imagination and frantic questioning of Camillo if it is ‘not noted’ and if the ‘lower messes / perchance are to this business purblind?’ (I.ii.217-228). His position is paradoxical in itself, he is divine in right and yet ages as any mortal man; he has powers beyond of any of those around him, yet is deeply dependent upon the willingness of his subjects to be under his rule to derive his power. For a king, reputation itself is power. He cannot afford to have his subjects laugh at him for being wrong (II.ii.200-1) and follows headstrong in his conviction of his wife’s guilt allowing only fear of the divine to change his verdict.

In a way it, is the very nature of a king’s double existence, as both man and estate, which generates the conflict between both parts, one fallible and mortal; the other demanding flawlessness and a seeming divinity that leads to the display of tyrannical behaviour. For how can a king be wrong when he is the definer of rights and wrongs? And how can a king allow his reputation to be tarnished by rumours, be they false or not, when his very existence depends on it? It is fear of loss, an all too human behaviour, which drives these characters to their tyrannical behaviour, as well as to abuse and jeopardise the very power they were trying to protect. Monarchies, as can be seen in both Shakespeare’s and Erasmus’ works, are only as good as the person that rules them.

REFERENCES

Danson, L. (1994) The catastrophe is a nuptial: the space of masculine desire in Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale. In Wells, S. (ed) Shakespeare Survey 46. Cambridge: Cambridge Universitt Press.

Felperin, H. (1999) Tongue-tied, Our Queen : The deconstruction of presence in The Winter’s Tale. In Ryan, K (ed) Shakespeare: The Last Plays. New York, NY: Addison Wesley Longman.

Greenblatt, S. (2005) Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Chicago, Il: The University of Chicago Press.

Hattaway, M. (2003) Tragedy and political authority. In McEachern, C. (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

James I (king of England), D. Fischlin and M. Fortier (1996) The True Law of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Doron. Toronto:

Kurland, S. (1991) “We Need No More of Your Advice”: Political Realism in The Winter’s Tale. In Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 31, No. 2, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Spring, 1991), pp. 365-386.

Palmer, D. (1995) Jacobean Muscovites: Winter, Tyranny, and Knowledge in The Winter’s Tale. In Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 323-339.

Shakespeare, W. (2008) Othello. In Greenblatt, S.(ed.) The Norton Shakespeare. 2^nd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton.

Shakespeare, W. (2008) The Winter’s Tale. In Greenblatt, S.(ed.) The Norton Shakespeare. 2^nd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton.

Slights, C. (1997) Slaves and Subjects in Othello. In Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Winter, 1997), pp. 377-390.

Vitkus, D. (1997) Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor. In Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 145-176.

Wells, R. (2009) Shakespeare’s Politics. New York, NY: Continuum.

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Elizabethan England had not seen any official Jew residents since their expulsion in 1290, some three hundred years before the first appearance of both plays. That does not mean, however, that anti-Jewish feelings were out of the ordinary for Elizabethans, as Jews were common villains in most medieval and renaissance dramas. Their ancient sin against Christ, which sprouted such feelings, being only but one of the resentment held against them, along with the associated practice of usury, which is lending money at an interest. Such anti-Jewish sentiment coupled with the growing fear of the ever menacing Ottoman Empire made for a very anti-Semitic society indeed. Both of these could easily be discerned by their distinctive appearance, the Jews with their different attires and some different physical features such as their usually larger nose, and the Ottoman’s with their darker skin. These easily identifiable aliens, however, were not the only ones which the English harboured enmity towards. The same can be said of the rather more physically similar European Catholics who had, by then, excommunicated the Protestant Queen Elizabeth. Among those specially disliked were the Spanish, for their attempt at invasion with the Armada in 1588, and the Italians, for their practice of money lending at an interest in the Jew free England (O’Rourke, 2003:376).

In order to better explore relationships between such varied of peoples Marlowe and Shakespeare need plausible locations in which the different religions could be found in coexistence. For Marlowe such a location is the island of Malta, a veritable nexus of different cultures facing the Ottoman Empire (Sullivan, 2006:234). As for Shakespeare, he finds his setting in the mercantile city of Venice, famous for its multicultural population. Therefore, it is important to notice that, although referred to constantly as Christians, they are in fact Catholics. Not only Catholics, but Spanish and Italians respectively, a fact that gives both writers distance to criticise them more freely without being at risk of being prosecuted as heretics, this is especially true to the already infamously controversial Marlowe (Lupton, 2006: 154)

Fie; what a trouble ’tis to count this trash.

(…)

And of a carat of this quantity,

May serve in peril of calamity

To ransom great kings from captivity.

(…)

And as their wealth increaseth, so inclose

Infinite riches in a little room. (Marlowe, I.i.7-37)

Thus goes our first meeting with Marlowe’s quasi monstrous, allegedly Machiavellian, infinitely energetic, and magniloquent Jewish protagonist Barabas, as he counts his money. His immense wealth however, as we are told in this soliloquy, was not acquired through usury, as an Elizabethan audience would expect, but by trade, much like Shakespeare’s Christian merchant Antonio. Right from the beginning his very existence is associated with money, which is associated with his happiness and holding nearly equal value to his own daughter (II.i.48-55). Barabas, in turn, associates the acquisition of money with his supposedly ‘scattered nation’ (I.i.120), holding wealth as their superiority over the Christians, who subjugate the Jews through the rather more, as he thinks, brutish and unreliable political powers: ‘Give us a peaceful rule; make Christians kings, / That thirst so much for principality.’(I.i.133-4). Upon having all his wealth taken away from him through this very political power by the Christian governor Ferneze, in order to pay ten years impending taxation to the Turks, on the simple account of him being an ‘infidel’, Barabas then turns towards not only reacquiring part of his wealth but, more importantly, to revenge in the pursuit of which he spares no expense and finds no sacrifice too high, not even his own daughter.

As he is fixated in having his vengeance, Barabas seems to loose his own magniloquence, his grand soliloquies on bags of ‘fiery opals’ and ‘Agamemnon and Iphigen’ are exchanged for shorter and much darker lines and crass comical asides. His own personality seems to degrade into the conventional stereotype of the evil Jew, as can be seen upon his purchase and following interaction with the Turkish slave Ithamore,

First, be thou void of these affections,

Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear;

Be mov’d at nothing, see thou pity none,

But to thyself smile when the Christians moan. (II.iii.171-4)

He goes on to make several exaggerated boasts of his crimes against the Christians, such as poisoning wells, making money of wars and being an usurer in a rather flippant manner. He even claims to have obtained his wealth through the later, something that contradicts his earlier statement of having acquired his wealth through trading and his repudiation of violent means, ‘…and nothing violent, / Oft have I heard tell, can be permanent.’ (I.i.131-2). As Simkin (2001:66) puts in his analysis of this section of the play, however one wishes to take this moment when Barabas self-portrays himself to be the very epitome of the Elizabethan Jewish stereotype, it is possible to take it as ironic.

It is also interesting to note that almost every single plot which Barabas concocts is a response to something which has aggravated him (Greenblatt, 1999:147). He kills the nuns and Abigail for the latter’s conversion and, therefore, damnation in the eyes of his religion. He kills the Friars for blackmailing him, and Ferneze’s son for the father’s injustice towards him; the arguable exception being his final stratagem, which leads to his demise in his own trap.

That is not to say however that audiences of the time would have sympathised with Barabas. His character is, after all, an amalgam of different stereotypes, such as The Vice from morality plays, and he is particularly linked with the sinful Machiavellian figure of renaissance theatre (Simkin, 2001:67). Therefore, despite his close connection to the audience through his opening soliloquies and his constant asides, it is difficult to see the audience of the time wholeheartedly siding with him. It is interesting to note that this, however, is true to Barabas alone and does not apply to all the Jews in the play. The three nameless Jews from the beginning are far more compliant to Ferneze’s demands and quietly vanish from sight, while Barabas’ daughter, Abigail dies a converted Christian, more pious then the Friar to which she confesses (III.vi.37-43).

Marlowe’s play being the first of the two to be staged in the early 1590s, precedes the renewal of anti-Semitist hatred that came to be with the case of Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jewish convert that was executed for an alleged assassination attempt on the Queen (Maus, 2008:1111). It was most probably this particular episode that the first audiences had in mind upon going to see Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, otherwise called The Jew of Venice, and its most famous character Shylock, the Jew.

Shylock owes much of his existence to Barabas. He, like his inspiration source, has a daughter which abandons and betrays him, and is consumed by thoughts of revenge. He, also resembling Barabas, seeks revenge mercilessly, despite being offered money to spare the object of his revenge, Antonio, far beyond that which his victim owes him. Thirst for retribution conquers greed, and in this he and Marlowe’s Jew are the same. The Old Law concept of an eye for an eye is at the core of the Old Testament and, therefore, of the Jewish religion. In this aspect both Barabas and Shylock can be seen as ardent believers, since they crave, as Shylock puts it, for ‘the Law’ and just retribution for the injustices carried out upon them on account of their faith. It is interesting to note also that both characters hatred for Christians is of reactionary nature, being brought over the edge by a final grand injustice brought upon them. The elopement of Jessica with Lorenzo puts Shylock in a mad rage and into a frenzy to exert his revenge (III.i.96-7) for the insults already previously committed upon him (I.iii.102-132).

He is also, however, quite a different character from Marlowe’s villainous Jew. His fixation with money is more ambiguous, he wishes his daughter to be dead and the jewels in her ear or the money on her coffin rather than having her squandering away the stolen money with her Christian eloper. One must remember that to convert to Christianity not only granted her eternal damnation, but also is considered a betrayal of her father, a deadly sin. He also places value on the ring he received from his late wife above of its monetary value (Shakespeare, III.i). However, unlike Barabas he is most surely a usurer, thus confirming one of the stereotypes expected. Another key difference between the two characters is that while Barabas constantly dominates The Jew of Malta and wreaks havoc upon Malta, Shylock, shown in constant contrast to his Christian opposite Antonio, is but one of the characters in the play and ultimately does no harm, being completely neutralised by Portia in the trial scene.

Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, is another character that differs from her inspiration though she, like Abigail, converts into a Christian. Jessica does so through marriage instead of entrance into a nunnery and is by far nowhere near as pious or good hearted as Abigail, who in her dying breath still cared for her father’s life. Jessica’s first action in the prospect of becoming a Christian is to steal her father’s money and elope with Lorenzo. Later she does her best to disassociate herself from her bonds with Shylock  (III.ii.283-6) and in order to  receive the acceptance of her husband’s friends, some of whom, such as Graziano, still consider her an infidel due to her Jewish blood (Adelman, 2003:7), transforming the religious prejudice into a racial one.

The idea of Jews being inherently cursed – ‘His blood be on us, and on our children’ (Matt. 27: 25) – due to choosing to save Barabbas over Christ, and the idea of their damnation being intrinsically connected to their race and not religion (White, 2006:77) is something that Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice touches upon more than once, Lancelot’s taunting of Jessica being one example (III.v.1-30), even though Shylock’s final fate is to be converted into a Christian, as a sign of Antonio’s mercy. Another theme that is at the core of The Merchant of Venice is the juxtaposition of Old Law versus New Law, Revenge versus Love, Justice versus Mercy (Greenblatt, 1999:142), or, in other words, the Old Testament versus the New Testament. Although this can also be seen in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, his Christians are not nearly as sympathetic, at first glance at least.

Ferneze, Barabas’ enemy and governor of Malta, is one of, if not the, main representatives of the Christian religion in Marlowe’s play. He uses religion as his excuse for taking Barabas’ money, even though Barabas pleads him to take but half his money, and not take his property and leave him penniless. Ferneze shows no mercy, a quality expected of a good Christian but excused, in this case, when dealing with a heretic. He even tries to convince Barabas’ that he is doing him a favour by taking his money, saying that ‘Excess of wealth is cause of covetousness: / And covetousness, oh ’tis a monstrous sin.’ (I.ii.124-5). To which Barabas replies, ‘Ay, but theft is worse: tush, take not from me then,’ (I.ii.126). Ferneze never answers, but transforms the Jew’s house into a nunnery. Baraba’s outcry at the hardness of Ferneze’s heart (I.ii.141-4) resembles that of Antonio towards Shylock’s unrelenting pursuit of his bond (IV.i.78-9). Barabas’ money, we find later, is never paid to the Turks but kept by Ferneze, by suggestion of the Spanish Admiral Del Bosco, who comes to Malta to sell slaves. It is a suggestion eagerly accepted by the governor, ‘Claim tribute where thou wilt, we are resolved, / Honour is bought with blood and not gold.’(II.ii.55-6)

Greed, then, is a driving force to both Christians and Jews alike in The Jew of Malta (Simkin, 2001:40) perhaps even more to the Christians, as can be seen with the Friars who compete to be the ones to convert Barabas when he promises to do so, and donate his wealth, in order to keep them silent about his crimes (IV.i). The friars’ lust for money causes their demise and so does Barabas’ lust for money and retribution, which doom him to his death. Ferneze’s lust for political power, however, is what leads him to outwit Barabas and come out victorious in the end.

Shakespeare’s Christians stand in stark contrast to their Jew foe. Where Shylock claims profit, they call for charity; where he shouts revenge, they yell mercy; where he is alone, they are many. Yet, they are not entirely without fault. Antonio, the exclaimed paragon of Christian virtue in the play, is revealed to us to have insulted and assaulted Shylock under no provocation, over the simple account of the latter being a Jew (I.iii.102-32) and engaged in usury, an activity deemed legal by the city. Mercy, which Portia claims to be the finest of qualities (IV.i.179-99) and a decidedly Christian concept, is then denied by both herself (IV.i.316-7) and Graziano (IV.i.374) and only comes at the cost of the forfeiture of half his wealth and his conversion to Catholicism. This mercy can be viewed as ironic for it means for Barabas damnation in the eyes of his faith, continued damnation in the eyes of the Protestant Elizabethan audience, and a life between not being fully accepted as a Christian, due to his Jewish blood and being spurned by his former fellow Jews due to his new religion.

The pursuit of influence is markedly a Christian characteristic in both plays. Barabas and Shylock seek wealth for wealth’s sake. When Barabas finds himself in a position of political power he hurries to be rid of it and seeks to be in a position in which he can profit safely (V.ii.29-123). His lack of political power, however, is his undoing. He is easily betrayed by Ferneze, for Barabas has no influence and, therefore, none to back and protect him. Shylock, on the other hand, seeks influence over Antonio in the form of a legal bond for the sole purpose of revenge. Once again lack of political influence turns out to be the Jew’s undoing, as the whole court stands united against him and eventually finds a way of not only annulling his bond, but reverting it against him. Christian ‘charity’ prevails.

Ferneze and Antonio use wealth quite differently from their Jew counterparts. For them, wealth is a tool to acquire power over others. For Ferneze it is but a step stone for political power; for Antonio it is a tool to acquire friendship, such as in Bassanio’s case (I.i.135-9), and also to obtain good reputation by lending money at no interest. Portia also uses wealth to ensure her hold over her husband, such hold being threatened by Antonio’s influence over him. She is thus forced to resort to the form of a moral debt, which materialises in the ploy of the rings (V.i.141-306) and the saving of Antonio (IV.i.162-404) to acquire her influence. She is then able to hold sway over her husband, break Antonio’s claim on him and so maintain a degree of control over her estate.

Thus, we can conclude that upon close analysis, while the Jews in both plays are not the most appealing of figures, they are also not complete monsters, or, at the very least, transformed into monsters by the discrimination and crimes committed against them in the account of their faith, thus making them come to embody the very prejudice held against them (Greenblatt, 1999:142). The Christians, for their part, receive a very different treatment from both playwrights. Marlowe is as full of contempt and irony against them as he is against any of the other religion/races depicted in his play. As for Shakespeare, his Christians may be depicted as superior, for better or worse, but yet not necessarily the embodiment of virtue that they claim to be.

REFERENCES

Adelman, J. (2003) Her Father’s Blood: Race, Conversion, and Nation in The Merchant of Venice. In Representations, No. 81, Tribute to Paul Alpers (Winter, 2003), pp. 4-30

Greenblatt, S. (1999) Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism. In Wilson, R.(ed.) Longman Critical Readers: Christopher Marlowe. New York: Addison Wesley Longman.

Lupton, J. (2004) The Jew of Malta. In Cheney, P.(ed) The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Marlowe, C. (1994) The Jew of Malta 2^nd Edition. London: A & C Black.

Maus, K. (2008) The Merchant of Venice. In Greenblatt, S.(ed.) The Norton Shakespeare. 2^nd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton.

O’Rourke, J. (2003) Racism and Homophobia in The Merchant of Venice. In ELH, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer, 2003), pp. 375-397

Shakespeare, W. (2008) The Merchant of Venice. In Greenblatt, S.(ed.) The Norton Shakespeare. 2^nd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton.

Simkin, S. (2001) Marlowe The Plays. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Sullivan, G. Jr. (2004) Geography and Identity in Marlowe. In Cheney, P.(ed) The CambridgeCompanion to Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

White, P. (2004) Marlowe and the politics of religion. In Cheney, P.(ed) The Cambridge

Companion to Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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In this essay it is my intention to analyse both the book ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, referred hereby as ‘Androids’ for ease of use, and its major film adaptation Blade Runner (Scott, 1982). This paper focus on their views on what apparently makes one human and if such a condition being human is exclusive to those pertaining to the homo sapiens species. Such analysis is done by close reading and by contrasting text and film with each other, especially on the matter of their more controversial and, to this essay at least, important characters: the androids.

‘My grand theme – who is human and who only masquerades as human?’ As it can be seen from his own words on “Second Variety, the human condition was a major concern to Dick (1976), not only in ‘Androids’ but throughout his life and works (Palmer, 2003: 8). As mentioned earlier, in this particular book empathy is considered as a particularly human ability. Through its highly intelligent androids, capable of rational thought beyond the level of most humans, and the so called ‘chickenheads’, humans who had their mental capacities diminished by the radioactive dust that permeates the world of ‘Androids’, the idea of rationality being the most human of traits is denied. However, empathy does not stand without being questioned either.

In the post apocalyptic world of ‘Androids’ most humans have either being killed by World War Terminus and its consequent nuclear fallout or are slowly degenerating because of it. The remaining humans on Earth are constantly bombarded with propaganda inviting them to move to the outer world colonies where they will receive their very own android to toil in their stead. It is in this kind of world that police bounty hunter Rick Deckard’s journeyhunting down six escapee androids taking refuge in North California takes place. The very beginning of the novel blurs the boundaries of human and machine,

A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. (…)

‘If you set the surge up high enough, you’ll be glad you are awake; that’s the whole point. At the setting C it overcomes the threshold barring consciousness, as it does for me.’

Here humans rely on machines such as the ‘mood organ’ to actively manage their state of mind artificially, much like as one would change the setting on a microwave. Empathy itself is moderated through a machine: the empathy box, with it one connects to the religious figure of Wilbur Mercer and, through him, with all those who connect at the same time share emotions, be they good or bad. Notable also is their dependence on television, not that unnatural in modern society, but still noteworthy, as it can be seen by Deckard’s worry for his wife when she says she does not wish to watch it,

‘(…) That way I’ll want to hop up to the roof and check out the sheep and then head for the office; meanwhile I’ll know you’re not sitting here brooding with no TV.’

His sheep however is, as we find out an ersatz, an electric artificial life form, much like the Androids his job requires him to kill. Nevertheless, he does not keep such a creature due to some sort of attachment to it, but as a sort of compliance to social expectation; all are expected to have an animal of some sort due to the teachings of Mercerism. As a matter of fact, we learn that he actually despises his own sheep and finds ownership of it degrading (p. 129) something that, while very humanlike, actually likens him to the androids as Dick sees them,

Becoming what I call, for lack of better term, an android, means, as I said, to allow oneself to become a means, or to be pounded down, manipulated, made into a means without knowledge or consent – the results are the same. (…) Androidization requires obedience. And most of all, predictability. (Dick, 1995: 191)

In other words, it is to allow oneself to be programmed into doing or acting in a particular way, that Deckard allows himself to be led by the common prejudice against artificial life forms and into the ‘forced’ ownership of animals by the tenants of Mercerism, the very religion that promotes empathy with all living creatures.

The book, therefore, consists of Deckard’s journey from this semi-android state into self discovery and retrieval of his lost humanity by his encounters with the androids which his mission demands him to kill, eventually learning to accept all forms of life, even those artificial. (Galvan, 1997: 414) ‘Androids’ has another protagonist, the chickenhead Isidore, he, unlike Deckard, is naturally capable to empathise with artificial life and becomes ‘friends’ with three of the escapee androids. However, he is made to realise the differences between them and humans as they mutilate a spider he found, yet even after witnessing their brutality he finds himself incapable of pointing Deckard in the direction of his quarry (Barlow, 2005: 51)

Dick’s androids areintelligent, though incapable of empathy (pg 28), as it can be seen on the aforementioned situation and in the fact that they are incapable of taking into consideration the lives of others, even other androids, (p.125) as long as it brings them some sort of profit. They are, as Isidore puts it, intellectual (pg 124), too intellectual in fact, to the point that they become jaded to most forms of emotion, which they do possess. It can be seen when Rick admits that Roy loved his wife, who are both androids, before killing him (p.168), and also in Rachel’s jealousy over Deckard’s wife and goat (p. 152) which eventually leads her to kill the later. Their intellectual prowess even leads them to quickly give up on their own lives when confronted with a no escape situation (p.151) renouncing any  will to survive, which they do possess to some extent, otherwise they would not struggle to survive in any way. Yet, one could argue that this eagerness to live is simulated rather than instinctive.

Therefore, while still being lives to be respected, the androids in Dick’s novel are, due to their incapability to empathise and register the weight of other lives, still inferior beings when compared to humans and a menace to those that surround them. Hence they must be hunted and stopped, even though it may seem wrong to do so (p.131) from a humanistic point of view. After all the ability to make exceptions is also something intrinsically human according to Dick (1995: 201)

Ridley Scott’s androids, however, are very different from those present in the novel which originated his movie Blade Runner. As a matter of fact, the whole movie is a very different beast from its original. Instead of radioactive dust we have constant rain, the concepts of Mercerism and much of the animal elements of the novel are almost completely absent from the movie. Instead of an average looking middle aged married Deckard, we get Harrison Ford playing the role of a bachelor ‘blade runner’, the movie’s term for those who hunt ‘replicants’ also known as androids. Deckard is then forced out of retirement to ‘retire’ four escapee replicants. Moreover, there is no mention of chickenheads or anything of the sort. However, the biggest difference is, without a doubt the treatment the movie gives to the replicants/androids (Fitting, 1987: 343).

Our very first encounter with one of the replicants happens on it being tested by a blade runner with the empathy test, upon being asked to describe his mother Leon, the movie’s replicant stand in for the novel’s Polokov. Leon answers by shooting and killing his interviewer, a clearly emotional as opposed to a rational one. Rachel is another character that vastly differs from her ‘Androids’ counterpart, here she actually falls in love with Deckard, whereas in the book she sleeps with him in order to stop him from being capable of hunting the remaining androids. She also goes as far as killing another replicant, Leon, in order to save him, which is a very irrational action considering that his job is to hunt replicants such as herself. Scott’s replicants are thus emotional beings as opposed to the rational androids present in Dick’s book.

Later on the movie, upon hearing of the deaths of two of his fellow replicants Roy can be seen almost crying to Pris, who in the movie’s stand in for his wife Irmgard. So not only are they emotional they are also capable of some level of empathy, even though his mood soon fluctuates as it does upon Pris death later on a very childlike characteristic. This infantile aspect of the replicants is accentuated with their association with J. F. Sebastian and his house full of toys and dolls and Leon’s attitude when he and Roy visit the man who made their eyes.

Even their reasons for escaping the colonies are different from those presented in the novel, since in Dick’s work they escape Mars in order to flee from their forced slavery on the hands of their human masters and choose Earth thinking it would be an easier place to hide. In Blade Runner they want more life, and have come to Earth to have their creators, the Tyrell Corporation extend their far too short four-year lifespan. Their life is precious to them and death scares them more then anything, which is an extremely human characteristic. Therefore, rather then inhuman monsters, the replicants in Blade Runner are more similar to ‘supra-humans’, i.e., humans with certain emotional and instinctual characteristics taken to extremes. As Tyrell says to Roy when he demands more life, ‘The life that burns twice as bright, burns half as long.’ Although this view of robots as being in some form ‘human’ conflicts with the cold and unfeeling androids present in the novel, it does match in some ways Dick’s newfound view of constructs masquerading as human in his essay 1972 ‘The Android and the Human’

What would occur to me now as a recasting of the robot-appearing-as-human theme would be a gleaming robot with a telescan lens and a helium-battery power pack, who, when jostled, bleeds. Underneath the metal hull is a heart such as we ourselves have. (1995: 185)

As a matter of fact, Deckard, even with his whole noir detective aura, is not as interesting a character as Roy is. Not only does Roy receive some of the most memorable lines in the movie, from quoting poetry to the primordial, ‘I want more life! Fucker.’ and others such as, ‘If only you could see what I have seen with your eyes.’ and, ‘It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker’. Roy also retains some of the most striking scenes, all painted with religious overtones, likening him to figures such as Judas, when he kisses Tyrell before killing him; Lucifer, on his descent from the stars to after rebelling against his creator; and Jesus, when he nails his own hand in order to prevent himself from stopping functioning. Yet the most striking scene of all, his own death scene, presents him not as a religious character but as the most unpredictable and human, even if only for that moment, of all the characters. By saving Deckard and imparting unto him but a fragment of his experience, not only does he finally appreciate the value of life, but he also urges Deckard to remember him by after his death, a most Hamletian and human desire. In Blade Runner it is Roy, not Deckard who makes a journey towards humanity.

Thus, by comparing both works one can appreciate that while very different, both Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Blade Runner have similar views into what makes one human. In both works the empathising with and the respect for the lives of others is an important part of what it is to be human. In the book it is impossible for androids to be human, but that is not the case in the movie. However in both it is possible to be Homo sapiens and still not be completely human as can be seen by Phil Resch and Deckard himself in ‘Androids’ and by the oppressing myopic figure of Tyrell, blind to the suffering of his creations, in Blade Runner. As for rational thinking, while definitely part of what makes us human it is not our most definitive trait; it must be coupled with emotion, instinct and empathy in order for us to be complete. Perhaps in a way we are all half animal, half machine.

REFERENCES

Barlow, A. (2005) How Much Does Chaos Scare You? New York, Shakespeare Sister, inc.

Dick, P. K. (1996) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? London, HarperCollinsPublishers

Dick, P. K. (1995) ‘The Android and the Human’ In Sutin, L. (Ed) The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings. New York, Vintage Books.

Fitting, P and R.M.P. (1987) ‘The Neutralization of Revolt in Blade Runner’. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, Science-Fiction Film (Nov., 1987), pp. 340-354

Galvan, J. (1997) ‘Entering the Posthuman Collective in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Nov., 1997), pp. 413-429

India, as we know it, is a state both new and so ancient as to be ageless, reaching back into the untold depths of myth. A fact not gone unnoticed by our narrator, the midnight child Saleem Sinai,

(…) because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country that could never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will – except in a dream we all agreed to dream; (Rushdie, 2006: 150)

Therefore, ironically the culturally varied India, heir to an impressive historical pedigree would never exist in its current form if not for its British colonisers. Dealing with 60 years of Indian history, 30 before independence and 30 after, Midnight’s Children tackles more than just the origins of the nation; it also portrays its first governments and the instatement and end of the Emergency government by Indira Gandhi. However, it does so not through omniscient narration of the country’s history, but through the personal experience of Saleem Sinai, who tells the story by hindsight.

Being in many ways a semi autobiography, Rushdie and Saleem share many similarities. His first attempt was to depict his home country’s past in historical exactness, however his memory soon failed him and he was forced to acknowledge the divergence of historical facts and those of memory (Rushdie, 1991: 10). Therefore, what we receive in Saleem’s narration are not hard facts, but facts tainted by the workings of his memory. As a matter of fact, Rushdie goes out of his way to make Saleem an unreliable narrator (1991: 22), even having him depict the death of Mahatma Gandhi in the wrong date.

This unreliability is something that the character himself acknowledges and yet refutes ascertaining his version to be as valid as ‘official’ history, thus creating tension between personal and historical truth,

‘I told you the truth,’ I say yet again, ‘Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.’ (2006: 292)

To further increase this tension Rushdie makes use of what is called body politics. He makes Saleem’s very body represent the Indian subcontinent (Kane, 1996: 95), his nose, we are told represents the Deccan peninsula and therefore India’s history is his own, or better yet his ‘fault’.

Polarities are abundant in Midnight’s Children: fact and memory, private and public, secular and religious, writing and oral, active and passive, metaphorical and literal, old and young, mythical and real, nose and knees to name but a few. One would expect a novel that is filled with so many paradoxes to burst with the conflict caused by such opposites, and eventually end up into that which Saleem fears the most: absurdity (2006: 4). However, that is not the case with Rushdie’s tale. Far from losing its way or being marred by the clash of such opposing forces, it instead derives force from it, thriving from the fact that, like Saleem and Shiva, one cannot exist without the other (Rege, 2003: 164).

The way in which Rushdie brings about such reconciliation of paradoxes is mostly through his use of a style which is an oxymoron in itself, Magical Realism, often associated with Latin American writers, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, writers which also suffer from a sort of double consciousness due to their colonial past and its never ending consequences. The style’s trademark is the blending of realism with fantastical elements, in the case of Midnight’s Children, we have historical facts mingled with the 1001 magical midnight’s children, the Germany trained doctor Aadam Aziz and his friend Tai, the thousands-years old boatman, the harshness of war and the surreal Sundarbans, among many other examples. Saleem’s narrative is at the same time plausible in itself and too fantastic for even his muse Padma to believe in (Schurer, 2004: 42).

Another way in which Rushdie deals with paradoxes is by imbibing them in the very structure of the novel. The novel is neatly divided in three books and organised in thirty chapters, each with its own thematic and meaningful title. The first book tells of the years before Saleem’s birth; the second depicts his growing up in newly independent India and his moving to Pakistan; and the third deals with his life during and post amnesia. Yet, despite such straightforward chronological organization, Saleem’s narrative is anything but linear; on the contrary, it constantly flashes backwards and forwards, alluding and referring to characters and situations that have either already occurred or that have yet to come to pass. Far from transforming the experience into an incomprehensible mess, the balance struck generates the effect of spellbinding the reader to the flow of the narration while keeping him alert and sceptical of its narrator.

Equilibrium is also applied to the very language used by Saleem in his narration; it fluctuates between grandiose epic and downright satiric, sometimes even in the same sentence,

Where the partitioned nations are washing themselves in one another’s blood, and a certain punchinello-faced Major Zulfikar is buying refugee property at absurdly low prices (2006: 150)

These satiric elements of the novel are generally directed at political characters and situations and by being spaced out and in between so many other layers of narrative, they become but another element of Saleem’s narrative (Ball, 2003: 212), keeping it from having a purely bleak and pessimistic view of Indian and Pakistani history. Punctuation also is one of Rushdie’s tools in order to accommodate such a plethora of themes and messages in his already bursting novel, going from simple punctuation, to abundant use of hyphens and stops (2006: 589) to the use of almost no punctuation at all in a stream of consciousness style (2006: 288-9).

There are even more paradoxes, such as the countering of written tradition by having Saleem narrate the novel orally to Padma; the perhaps unconscious opposition of writing a decidedly Indian novel about Indian history in the language of its past coloniser; and the paradoxical opposition of the form, full of life, and content of the novel, which has a decidedly bleak ending with the midnight’s children all ending either dead or impotent both literally and metaphorically, which is pointed out by Rushdie himself (1991: 16). Nevertheless, all these paradoxes generate not only the life force of the novel and further meaning, but also a general message to post colonial nations in general, for countries that where colonised can never return to be what they were. They must become new entities by taking bits and pieces from both their regional and colonial origins and become both the same and more than both. This is the message that makes Midnight’s Children an important and relevant literary work even almost 30 years after its publishing.

REFERENCES

Ball, J. C. (2003) Satire and the Menippean Grotesque in Midnight’s Children. In Bloom, H. (Ed) Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Salman Rushdie. Chelsea, Chelsea House Publishers.

Kane, J. M. (1996) The Migrant Intellectual and the Body of History: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. In Contemporary Literature, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 94-118

Rege, J. E. (2003) Midnight’s Children and Post-Rushdie National Narratives.  In Bloom, H. (Ed) Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Salman Rushdie. Chelsea, Chelsea House Publishers.

Rushdie, S. (2006) Midnight’s Children. London, Vintage.

Rushdie, S (1991) Imaginary Homelands. London, Granta Books.

Schurer, N. (2004) Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: A Reader’s Guide. New York, Continuum International Publishing.

Since its publication in 1847, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has always caused its critics trouble, for while it is obviously a powerful novel, its ‘meaning’, if at all existent, is hardly easy to grasp. This was doubly true to its contemporary critics who saw only “glimpses or secondary meanings” and “refrained from assigning any” moral to the work (Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 1848). This was mostly due to the highly controversial personality of its main character, Heathcliff. We shall speak more of that later. However, this begs the question: is there really an underlying moral to the story? My answer to that would simply be, ‘Yes; several of them, in fact.’

Now this may seem a preposterous statement due to the fact that it is the very nature of morals that they should be a succinct maxim, a simple universal truth that one derives from a tale or historical fact, and can then happily apply to their reality. However, I would argue that every person’s reality is somehow different and, therefore, the morals which they derive are, by a logical progression, also different. Such as, the moral a child takes from the Little Red Riding Hood could be, ‘don’t talk to strangers’ or ‘obey your mother’ or ‘beware of wolves’. While the moral for the parents’ would be ‘keep close watch of your children’ and for grandmothers’, ‘make sure to check who it is before opening the door’. They are all different, but still derived from the same story by different readers. Therefore, one could say that a moral, as a universal truth which holds true for all that come into contact with the text, is inexistent. One could then, questionably, reply that the ‘moral’ of a text is the intended message of its author; most literary critics are, however, well acquainted with the impossibility of ascertaining such a message (Barthes, 1977).

Wuthering Heights in this particular has, as mentioned earlier, especially troubled critics for being particularly difficult to grasp in ‘moral’ terms. The tragic love story of Heathcliff and Catherine, and the former’s consequential ‘moral teething’ of their oppressor’s and agents of her ‘fall’, told in a narration within a narration by ‘common sense’ filled Nelly Dean to her ‘city gentleman’ listener Lockwood, is a surprisingly ambiguous text which paradoxically screams of moral lessons. It is one of the more interesting aspects of the novel the means by which its readers and critics are driven to derive their own morals from the book for, while the readings clearly vary, the way in which they are achieved hardly does. For a better look at how the text leads its readers into generating their own reading and possibly the reasons behind it, a closer look into three of its more conventional readings, namely, Marxist, feminist and psychoanalyst analysis, will carried out in the first part of this paper. I will then analyse the way in which such readings are based on defining factors of the text and how these factors, examined against the text itself, generate further meanings of their own.

1. WAYS OF LOOKING AT WUTHREING HEIGHTS

A Marxist reading of the text, as befitting this school of thought, focuses on the social aspects of the novel. The young Heathcliff, a gipsy child found in Liverpool, and the young Catherine, both wild children and oppressed by the head of their household, Hindley who later forces Heathcliff to work the land, are seen to represent the more natural proletariat and the French Revolution ideals of equality and brotherhood of men. This is especially so in the case of Heathcliff. Opposed to the couple we have not only their oppressor, Hindley, but also the world of gentility, represented by Trushcross Grange and its almost artificially bourgeois inhabitants, the Lintons.

Upon his quasi-mythical return as a ‘gentleman’ in the second part of the novel, Heathcliff then turns into a social avenger by wielding the weapons of his oppressors (capital, arranged marriages and property) against them, symbolising thus a form of the rise of the proletariat against their former masters. Catherine, by deciding to marry Linton, because of his superior social status, is in turn driven insane as a result of distancing herself from Heathcliff and the ideals he embodies (Eagleton, 1993: 119). Eagleton in his essay also attributes Heathcliff to symbolise the ideal as opposed to the real, therefore making Catherine’s inability to marry Heathcliff represent the impossibility of the idealised to come to fruition in reality (1993: 129). This is a reading that resonates with the failure of Socialism to deliver its ideals in the socio-historical reality of the former Soviet Union. The moral is thus being in the danger of repressing your fellow men and the consequential generators of your wealth and also in the maddening failure of the perfect ideal to come to fruition in a reality riddled with imperfections.

A feminist reading of the text has Heathcliff as the psychological counterpart of Catherine, and thus representing the empowered female who resists the power of patriarchal society. Hence, Catherine becomes the true subject of the book. Her first encounter with the Lintons and, consequential maiming by the bulldog Skulker, acquire sexual and social overtones representing the coming of age and subsequent social castration of the girl (Gilbert, 1993:141). She is then socially conditioned and constrained from being a wild and natural child into a ‘young lady’ by the Lintons. Her marriage to Edgar, which occurs only after Heathcliff has exiled himself, then concludes her fall into conformity of patriarchal rule (p.144).

The end of the novel, with Heathcliff’s death – for he has already done his part- sees the inversion of roles in the Wuthering Heights household. The second Catherine is the one who commands culture and instructs Hareton, who, despite being named after the first patriarch of the Earnshaws and still being the ‘master’ of the house, is culturally ignorant and, therefore, lorded over by his wife to be. It represents an idealised and more peaceful status quo with a higher role and position in society for women after the reactionary destructive vengeance of the oppressed female upon its male oppressors.

One of the problems with such a reading is the fact that Heathcliff, when compared to Edgar Linton, is obviously the more masculine figure, being the ‘tall and athletic’ Heathcliff when compared to the slender Linton. Gilbert in her essay, however, argues that Linton represents the legal and intellectual dominion of Patriarchy (p. 145). Hence, the gentleman reborn Heathcliff represents a rise of femininity into cultural power reaping revenge unto patriarchy. The madness which afflicts Catherine is due to her imprisonment unto marriage which leaves her powerless by the time her revolutionary feminist self, Heathcliff, returns to haunt her. It leads her to a breakdown of her sense of self, and she, tellingly, cannot recognize her own image in the mirror any longer.

A psychoanalyst reading of the text views Heathcliff as the Id, the Freudian term for the suppressed sub-consciousness of human nature which incorporates unbridled passions such as incestual sexual desire and desire for revenge. Heathcliff and Catherine are raised as, and might actually be, brother and sister and, with buried vengeful emotions, the young ‘gipsy’ quietly takes the abuse of his stepbrother Hindley to later wreck it upon Hareton, the Lintons and even, arguably, himself.  Due to his dialectic nature with Heathcliff, Edgar Linton, therefore comes to represent the Superego, the controlling and suppressing aspect of the psyche associated with culture. Tellingly, Trushcross Grange is a house filled with light, open spaces and open windows while Wuthering Heights is dark and foreboding with dark rooms, small windows and a constant roaring fire.

Once more we come to one of the main points of the story, Catherine’s madness. In this reading madness is caused by the return of the suppressed psyche, a very Freudian theme, which then wreaks havoc upon her reality to the point of causing a form of schizophrenia. After Catherine’s  death Heathcliff then turns into a more general sort of Id, transformed from being her suppressed psyche into being the ethos of the society of the time. In consequence the book becomes a form of criticism of the culture and the way of life of the author’s time, marked as the rise of reason over emotion, and a warning against the suppression of one’s desires. Lockwood as a character and narrator adds weight to such a reading with his highly significant dreams and his obviously self-deceiving nature, which tends to reiterate facts in a manner to better suit his own ego.

2. ANALYSIS OF THE INNER WORKINGS OF THE TEXT

Thus by examining these three different theoretical readings one can have a better insight into the workings of the book; it is by imbuing the character of Heathcliff with symbolic meanings that one reaches his own reading of Wuthering Heights. In a way his character works as a sort of mirror showing us that which we want to see: an idealised social avenger to a disillusioned Marxist; a powerful revolutionary female to a feminist; and the dangers of suppressed subconscious to a psychoanalyst. Moreover, as a mirror he is not without his own frame: his is the role of an avenger; one who seeks retribution from those he thinks have wronged him. However his character is such as he is basically devoid of an identity by himself – he is a dark and foreign looking child who is suddenly thrust into the world of the Wuthering Heights manor from the streets of Liverpool and is then given the name of a deceased son. No other hints are given as to his origin and his voice is seldom heard without a commentary from its narrator.

From the very beginning Brontë makes him the subject of others’ interpretation, to the point where his very identity is taken over by Catherine with her ‘I am Heathcliff’ (Brontë, 1992: 59) speech. And yet the inverse is also true for it is through Heathcliff that the other characters gain higher symbolical meaning, for without him not only there would be no story but its characters would also lose any moral meaning. In a way, the biggest enigma of the text is also its greatest generator of meaning. Brontë is not oblivious of this paradox, since she has her main narrator, Nelly, encourages the young Heathcliff to dream up his own origins and identity,

Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week’s income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together? And you were kidnapped by wicked sailors and brought to England. Were I in your place, I would frame high notions of my birth; and the thoughts of what I was should give me courage and dignity to support the oppressions of a little farmer! (p. 40)

To later have Heathcliff himself scoff the idea of romanticising his character when he describes his own wife, Isabella Heathcliff ye Linton, to Nelly,

‘She abandoned them under a delusion,’ he answered; ‘picturing in me a hero of romance, and expecting unlimited indulgences from my chivalrous devotion. I can hardly regard her in the light of a rational creature, so obstinately has she persisted in forming a fabulous notion of my character, and acting on the false impressions she cherished. (p. 109)

If one is to read into the character of Heathcliff, one does so at one’s own expense and risk. In some ways it is the great sin of almost all the characters in the novel that they let their own notions and prejudices take precedence over their experience of the other. Nelly’s disgust with his skin colour leads her to call the young Heathcliff by ‘it’ and to ‘put it on the landing of the stairs, hoping it might be gone on the morrow’ (p.26). Lockwood upon first meeting Heathcliff, and seeing him as a gentleman with the same ‘misanthropist’ inclinations as he deems himself to have, calls him ‘A capital fellow!’(p.1). Edgar Linton still considers Heathcliff to be a ‘ploughboy’ and ‘a runaway servant’ (p.68) even though it had been three years since he last saw him.

Likewise the reader is never given direct access to Heathcliff. His voice and image are always mediated by not only one but two narrators, both of which hardly qualify for the rank of reliable narrators, making our picture of him marred by their interference, with Nelly being even more morally dubious then her counterpart (Hafley, 1958: 199). Brontë also plays with her readership’s preconceived notions of genre and character. She has Heathcliff being constantly alluded as the devil by other characters, and has the former mentioning the latter in almost all his lines in the text, therefore, taunting with her readers’ Christian beliefs. This constant referencing links him to another character that revolts against his own fate even though he knows it will be his undoing, Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

The constant mentioning of the devil also alludes to the monster of the Gothic genre since Heathcliff is, after all, the dark lord of a dark mansion on the top of a wuthering hill whose main endeavours upon losing his soul, as he would put it, are to bring misery and despair to all those around him. The play with Gothic expectations is further extended by means of the narrator Lockwood, who starts of the book in the style of a diary entry,

1801 – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.

This is a literary gimmick classic to the Gothic genre to which this novel subscribes, but also subverts. Lockwood then proceeds to have nightmares with the wraith of a little girl. Wraiths are also present at the end of the novel where, after Heathcliff’s death, there are accounts that ‘he walks’ (p.244) alongside a fellow female spirit.

Last but not least, by aligning Heathcliff with the natural, Brönte also brings forth the views of the Romantic Movement thus allowing Heathcliff to personify its ideals or come to represent the Byronic Hero, a free-loving non-conformist spirit with a suicidal tendency. These figures are strongly counteracted not only by Edgar and Lockwood, but also by Nelly and her ‘common sense’ and social demeanour, which make her almost unable to even break a curfew under the order of her master (p.43/64), but still entirely capable of withdrawing information from the authorities (p. 244). They are, therefore, the keepers of the social conventions that Heathcliff subverts.

3. CONCLUSION

By examining the several readings that have been made out of Wuthering Heights we have  come to analyse the ways in which Brönte drives the reader not to only generate multiple meanings, but also to be baffled by which to consider true. It is the very nature of the text to resist such simplifying readings, just as Heathcliff denies the imparting of meaning upon himself, in the case of Isabella’s reading of his personality. However, it also entices these readings through Heathcliff’s lack of social identity, and welcomes it, in the case of Catherine’s self-identification with him (?). Yet, I would not go as far as Miller in his essay ‘Wuthering Heights and the Ellipses of Interpretation’ (1980: 52) in saying that, “The secret of Wuthering Heights is, that there is no secret truth.” For, from my point of view, allreadings of the text are valid in their own right; even if they were not the author’s intention per se, since morals, as a concept, are used to guide and direct our understanding by enriching our experience of the text and, through it, of life.

However, I would reason that this is a novel that argues about the dangers and the lure of over moralising texts and/or facts to the point of one becoming blinded to reality by one’s own, often misguided, preconceptions, while still bringing forth the necessity of some sort of moral to make possible the generation of meaning and identities.

REFERENCES

Barthes, R. (1977) “Death of the Author” in S. Heath (ed) Image-Music-Text. New York: Hill and Wang.

Brontë, E. (1992) Wuthering Heights. Ware. Wordsworth Editions Limited.

Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 15 January 1848.

Eagleton, T. Myths of Power in Wuthering Heights. In Stoneman, P. (ed) New Casebooks Wuthering Heights (1993). London. The Macmillan Press Ltd

Gilbert, S. Looking oppositely: Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell. In Stoneman, P. (ed) New Casebooks Wuthering Heights (1993). London. The Macmillan Press Ltd

Hafley, J. (1958) The Villain in Wuthering Heights. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 13, No. 3 pp. 199-215

Miller, J. H. (1980) Wuthering Heights and the Ellipses of Interpretation. Notre Dame English Journal, Apr. 1980