Inter-Uterine Hybridity: cultivating the ‘Unheimliche’ in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.

“All night within her womb

The worm lay, till it grew to a serpent”

William Blake, The First Book of Urizen. ll. 347-48.

 

Daphne du Maurier begins her novel Rebecca (1938)[1] describing “some half-breed from the woods, whose seed had been scattered long ago beneath the trees and then forgotten” (3) and ends it with the revelation of the titular character’s “certain malformation of the uterus” (413). This introduces the notion of both half-breed

Bees and Brutality: Plath’s violent writing across the state and home.

“If the leader’s lost they break faith, and tear down the honey

they’ve made, themselves, and dissolve the latticed combs.”

(Virgil, Georgics. IV. ll.214-215)

“Here are my bees,

Brazen, blurs on paper.”

(Carol Ann Duffy, The Bees. ll.1-2)

Plath claimed that she knew “nothing of bees. My father knew it all” (Axelrod, 25)[1]. Jessica Luck challenges this self-criticism in arguing that “Plath is revising the highly organized “theoretical world” of her father’s bumblebees in her more “real world” experience with honeybees” (Luck, 296).

From Transgender to Transparent: The Tiresias ‘Politic’ in Blake.

“I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest.”

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land. ll. 228-229

William Blake’s relationship with Dante’s Divine Comedy is an overt one; his illustrations ascertain his knowledge with the narrative poem. Ample scholarship has examined

Blushing Wives and Single Mothers; Femininity and Maternity in Wollstonecraft’s writing.

In John Gregory’s conduct manual of 1774, A Fathers Legacy to his Daughters, Gregory announces several problematic claims in attempt to produce daughters into modest, ‘blushing wives’. He asserts to “point out those virtues and accomplishments which render you most respectable and most amiable in the eyes of my own sex” (Gregory, 45). Yet his idealised, blushing female is barren one;

Virtue and Value: Female Sexuality and currency in Cleland’s Fanny Hill.

‘Virtue’ and ‘value’ have prehistorically been understood in the terms that as the former increases, as does the latter. Virtue, associated with conduct and chastity, parallels to value, which connotes to worth, currency and wealth. This currency referred to serves as any sort of material with which trade can be negotiated, a desired product. Ideal virtue therefore, is not limited to the bounds of sex, but also serves as a means of currency.

‘It is the poet’s business to give us the feeling of an intimate union between the word and the mind’; Clare and Wordsworth’s poetical ‘business’.

Both Clare and Wordsworth focus on the importance of natural feeling, the feeling of man, and thus, the workings of the mind. They both indeed make it their ‘business’ to unite the word with the mind, in that their works emphasise the importance of raw, personal feeling, the contains of the ‘mind’, and the need for these feelings to be represented on the page. They not only demonstrate the intimate union of these two realms, but the natural union of them;

‘Playing’ with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

In Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Winnicott’s Playing and Reality, ideology regarding playing not only provides explanations for the interactions that occur within The Waste Land, but also for the way that we as readers interact with the text physically. The Waste Land itself is neither an internal nor external thing;

Are Shakespeare’s men and women complex ‘types’ rather than three-dimensional characters?

Both in Measure for Measure and his Sonnets, Shakespeare’s characters are initially categorised and sorted into various types; the ‘Duke’, ‘Nun’, ‘Friar’, ‘youth’ ‘dark lady’ and so forth, but the texts do not secure them as so. It seems somewhat straightforward to distinguish these types, yet it is with some scrutiny of Shakespeare’s texts that we can determine that these typecasts are in fact more often than not, mere exteriors or facades of what are in fact morally complex and indeed three-dimensional characters.

“I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man’s”: Blake’s response to established institutions.

Why is liberty important to this period, and how does the concept of liberty shape the period’s writing?

Blake identifies the established and most dominant institutions of the Eighteenth-Century as both the state and the Church, institutions that he addresses in his Song of Liberty. These institutions are successful in so far as they enforce and regulate society, but this established authority is problematic.