Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
4th International Conference on the Philosophy of Language, Literature, and Linguistics, Manisa, Türkiye, 9 - 11 Mayıs 2024
The Projection and
Loss of Masculinity in S. T. Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and
D. H. Lawrence’s “Snake”: A Psychoanalytic Reading
Ercan Tugay Akı[1]
Abstract
This paper puts S. T. Coleridge’s “The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and D. H. Lawrence’s “Snake” under scrutiny from a
psychoanalytic perspective and argue that the poetic personas and the male
heroes in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Lawrence’s “Snake”
succumb to sadomasochistic fantasy in the face of a threat posed by the
maternal figures to their phallocentric authority. In the process of examining
the two major imageries that the poems share—namely the albatross and the
snake—in detail, the paper borrows such psychoanalytic key concepts as
sadomasochistic fantasy, phallus, phallocentrism, fantasised virility, and
phantasm of woman from Irigaray and Cixous. The paper, to be more specific,
seeks to prove that although these two works of literature are attempted to be
appropriated within the phallocentric tradition by the narrators, their
attempts give way to the subjugation of maleness and masculine authority at the
hands of the all-pervasive and dominating feminine imageries, metaphors,
figures, and forces, which cannot be located within the phallocentric logic of
the signifiers.
Keywords: the albatross,
the snake, phallocentrism, sadomasochistic fantasy, loss of masculinity
[1] Research Assistant, İstanbul
Gelişim University, Department of English Language and Literature,
İstanbul/Turkey, etaki@gelisim.edu.tr