Oedipus Complex in Sons and Lovers

 

It was Freud the modern psychologist who built up the theory of the Oedipus Complex based on the ancient myth of Oedipus Rex of Thebes. To explain his theory he says that a mother’s love for her son and a son’s love for his mother are fundamentally based upon the attraction between opposite sexes. D. H. Lawrence is a great novelist of human psychology. He has drawn many distinguishing characters in his novels. The relationship between Paul and his mother is an “Oedipus Complex” case in Sons and Lovers. 

William had been Mrs Morel’s favourite son. She had been lavishing all her love and affection upon him. She had been cherishing high ambitions about his future. Especially she had felt proud when he got a job in London on a decent salary. She felt a little disappointed when he fell in love with a superficial girl, Lily Western. William had loved his mother deeply too. That is why he kept writing loving letters to his mother when he went to London. Now, the love between William and Mrs Morel was not a case of ordinary love between a mother and her son.

After the death of her oldest son, Paul becomes the focus of her life. But Paul has a love relationship with Miriam. Mrs Morel does not tolerate the absorbing nature of Miriam. Mrs Morel thinks that she is becoming neglected by her son Paul because of his relationship with Miriam. She again and again tells that she cannot bear it at any cost. At that time, Paul tries to console his mother by telling her that he loves his mother, not Miriam. His home with his mother is the real centre of attraction. But his mother cannot understand it. Even she says that she can let another woman for her son but not Miriam because she leaves no room, but a bit of room for

Mrs Morel's love for Paul had an element of anguish in it because she always felt uneasy over the thought that Paul was wasting his time and energy over the wrong girl. Later, Mrs Morel wanted Paul to give up his friendship even with Clara because Clara was married. Paul had developed a sexual relationship with Miriam, but he could not discuss this matter with his mother. At the same time, he had developed a sexual relationship with Clara; he could not discuss the subject with his mother. It was another part of the "Oedipus Complex”.

There is another  "Oedipus Complex" touch in Paul's love relationship with his mother. His love for her even proved an obstacle in the way of his loving any other woman in a normal manner. When she felt ill, he again showed extraordinary devotion to her. During her illness, he had no peace of mind at all. Tears would flow from his eyes when he saw her suffering. He spoke to Clara about his mother's lingering illness. All day long he was very worried about his mother. It was a long pain which made him feel feverish. He often addressed his mother as "Pigeon" and "my little", as if she were his sweetheart and sweet lover.

Thus the days passed, the weeks, and the months. When his mother died, Paul felt that his life is empty and meaningless. It was with great effort that he was able to persuade himself that his mother was still alive. It was this feeling which saved him from despair and from suicide.

To sum up, we can say that the "Oedipus Complex" is a leading theme of this novel. Actually, the novelist has not invented this relationship; he has only described his own experience with his mother. Paul is D H. Lawrence himself; and Paul's mother is Lawrence's own mother. So we may say that the central theme of Sons and Lovers may best be described as the "Oedipus Complex”.

Robert Browning as an Optimistic Poet

 

Browning is a moralist and a religious teacher. His optimism is based on life's realities. Life is full of imperfection but in this very imperfection lies hope, according to Browning's philosophical views. Actually, the philosophy of Browning is the philosophy of a man looking at the world with more than a glimmer of hope in his eyes. He holds a very distinct place among the writers of the Victorian Age. He is an uncompromising foe of "Scientific Materialism". He preaches God and universality as the central truth of his philosophy of life.

As an optimist, he portrayed almost all kinds of people from different stages of society in his poems. He had gone so far as to study the relationship between Man and the entire world. His poems are full of courage and inspiration for those people of the world. We can prove Browning as an optimist more clearly from the following analysis.

Browning is a man with hope for the fate of humans. Actually, his hope is not for this world, but for the next world too. He believes that the soul of a human being is immortal. After death, there will be an action for Man by God named salvation in which he will be rewarded or punished for his deeds from his birth to his death. As, in his “The Last Ride Together”, he said-

We fall to rise, are baffled to fight better

Sleep to wake”

As we have already known that Browning has a strong belief in the immortality of the soul. According to him, only the human body dies, but the soul lives on in the infinite, the place of God. Again in “The Last Ride Together”, the speaker of the poem says that after death his and his beloved’s soul will enter and meet into eternity and will stay there eternally.

“The instant made eternity,

And Heaven just prove that I and she

Ride, ride together, forever ride?”

There is no doubt that Browning has firm faith in the divinity of God. His characters, especially the speakers are compressed with the belief in God. He addressed God and immortality as the central truth of his philosophy of life.

Besides, he does not mean that there is no suffering or evil in the world at all. Evil is actually a moral condition in the way of man’s improvement. It is a man who cannot be successful without an enemy. It is only awareness and failure that will help man in his advance toward perfection.

In his poems, Browning asks man to keep himself drowned in an imperishable struggle. Because success will come only through hard work. He puts stress on continuous human effort. He also believes that hard work with a definite goal is much better than a struggle that has no aim. Once a man has learned to struggle, there will be no goal that he cannot achieve.

“Andrea Del Sarto” is the kind of poem in which Browning lays emphasis on the role of human struggle. No man can achieve the peak of a hundred per cent perfection, but he should keep his struggle go on so that he may reach somewhere near perfection. As Andres says-

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,

Or what’s a heaven for?”

So, after the above discussion, we can conclude that Browning’s strong optimistic faith is very notable in the Victorian age. If we scan all the English poets, we may not find as many complete, conscious, magnificent men with a sense of optimism as Robert Browning.

Robert Browning as a writer of dramatic monologue

 

The poem which has a speaker and silent listener or listeners may be called Dramatic Monologue. The speaker reveals his thoughts in front of silent listeners. The listener remains silent all through the poem but infers his presence from what the speaker says. The speaker’s utterance is a response to an occasion or event of crucial importance in his life.

In Browning’s dramatic monologues, generally, we find there is a single speaker.  In the poem “My Last Duchess”, the Duke who is a sixteenth-century nobleman of Italy, is the speaker and the only silent listener is the emissary who has come to him to negotiate for his second marriage with a count’s daughter. Each of the dramatic monologues of Browning has an abrupt and arresting. The poem “My Last Duchess”, starts with a dramatic suddenness:

“That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall

                                              Looking as if she were alive:”

Browning’s dramatic monologues provide an understanding of the character of the speaker. For instance in “Porphyria’s Lover”, we find the psychological makeup of the speaker. He is afraid that the blissful moment of love will pass away. So he kills his beloved. Yet he suffers no sense of guilt, as he says in this poem:

“And all night long we have not stirred

And yet God has not said a word!”

The murder reminds us of the murder of the Duchess by the Duke in Browning’s “My Last Duchess”. The Duke says:

“This grew, I gave command

Then all the smiles stopped together”

Porphyria’s lover is not as cruel as Duke. He just wants to get his beloved permanently. In “Andrea Del Sarto”, we can see an uxorious husband whose love for his wife destroys his career as an artist. Similarly in “Fra Lippo Lippi”, we find a monk who is morally loose. Thus all those dramatic monologues successfully concentrate on the personality of the speaker.

Regarding Browning’s exceptionally brilliant use of blank verse, Arthur Symons rightly says that “He is perhaps the greatest master in our language” in heroic couplets. He maintains a balance between his style and content. The language and tone of “Porphyria’s  Lover”, are equally remarkable for their simplicity and naturalness. Porphyria has murdered his beloved. But he narrates the event so naturally that reader does not hate the crime, as he says in this poem:

“No pain felt she

I am quite sure she felt no pain”

Realistic and beautiful nature-picture is another striking feature of Browning’s dramatic monologues. These two are not taken from a single country. As he took his character from various ages and various countries. Similarly, he picked up his nature scenes and landscapes as background for human thought and emotion. For example, the description of the lace where the Grammarian is to buried heightens. The speaker says in the following ways in the poem:

“Here’s the top peak…..

Bury this man there?”

In light of our discussion, we can easily say that Robert Browing is very successful in handling the form of dramatic monologue in his poems. Almost all the elements of a successful dramatic monologue are presented in his poems. Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues are thoughtful, confessional, and self-revealing.

 

Arms and the Man: As a Anti-romantic Comedy

 

Arms and the Man is a famous play written by George Barnard Shaw that was first performed on April 21, 1984. This play uncovers the falseness of the war and deals with the two facades of human nature. It is regarded as an anti-romantic play because through this play Shaw has criticized the dreamlike worship of life. The play is also a comedy because in it Shaw has openly ridiculed the futility of romantic love and the idea of war. We can also call Shaw’s play a didactic play because the dramatist aims to show his readers the reality of love and war. 

Shaw brings up anti-romantic aspects in  Arms and the Man through situational irony. Raina, in the beginning, accepts the romantic idea of war and in her dreams manifests this idea in the character of Sergius, with whom she is in love. Her ideas of war and love both rests on physical appearance and fantasies. But Bluntschli enlightens her of this romantic concept of soldierly bravery, expressing it as merely an unprincipled form of stupidity. Eventually, Raina abandons her romantic ideas and is assured that a more practical perception is superior and changing her romantic feelings for Segius with a more profound love for Bluntschli. 

Shaw’s argument of romantic love is more complicated than it appears primarily. Love is not what Raina was thinking in the First Act, which is the uniting of her soul to Sergius’s and the concept that they could possibly live merrily together. Their association appears perfect, with her flawless virtuosity and his valour and glory. Shaw says this kind of love is based on misrepresenting how an individual acts besides fairy tales. 

In Arms and the Man, the characters and their conversations are either guided by romantic love or lack of it. During the early twentieth century, the societal traditions of love incorporated social courting, parental consent, and giving importance to the prestige and money of each partner. But the characters in the play go against the general standard and end up with a character that is well-suited to them. 

Characters gradually disillusion themselves with the characteristics of romantic love they have greatly admired throughout their lives and find that it is much more complicated. For example, At the beginning of the play, it seems that Raina is in love with Sergius, but when she became infatuated with Blunstshcli, she understands that her love for Sergius was shallow and not profound. Raina may also have fallen in love with Sergius because he was applauded as a hero and also because her mother Catherine and her father Petkoff encouraged the relationship to preserve the family’s prestige. 

On the other hand, Louka, even though she is engaged to Nicola, doesn’t seem to have ever been in love with him and exhibits that she is eager to make an effort to tie the knot into an upper rank. Romantic love doesn’t appear to be a concern in her judgments. The preliminaries of Louka’s relationship with Sergius are adulterous and go against the norms of courtship. The first meeting of Bluntschli and Raina is also unusual, as they meet covertly in her bedroom. And eventually, when they got engaged, Bluntschli, the practical and crafty soldier, astonished everyone by disclosing himself to be a lifelong romance.

Shaw does not completely reject the concept of romantic love. Rather, he only allows it when characters discard their preconceptions about romantic love. Blunstshcli casts aside much of his soldierly courageous behaviour before Raina when he first meets her in her bedroom. And Raina also confesses that she is not altogether a perfect individual, as she often does and utters things that oppose righteous and decent behaviour.

We cannot call the relationship of Louka and Sergius a proper romantic relationship. Their relationship is based on lust and ambitions together with the advancement of one’s social status. This is possibly not romantic love in the way Blunstshcli and Raina exhibit, and it is certainly not the kind of romantic love Raina manifests at the beginning of the play. Shaw appears to place a lot more importance on the way individuals behave, instead of their romanticized ideas about behaviour and conduct. 

Arms and the Man also talks about how war is fought. Shaw has taken the title of the play from Virgil’s “Aeneid” which extols war. Shaw used this title ironically to show how war should not be judged as romantic. 

Bluntschli is a Swiss mercenary who has employed himself for the Serbians together with other soldiers. Sergius is expected to exhibit the 'heart' of the Bulgarians' mission, with his courageous charge at the beginning of the play illustrating how firmly he wants to preserve his nation’s glory. But as the story of the play progresses it becomes clear that war is merely a piece of work for soldiers. Sergius whom we thought to be a brave hero was actually marshalling a foolish charge against the opponent. He does this only so that he gets promoted to a higher rank. Bluntschli also breaks up Raina’s fairy-tale idea of war and bravery when he manifests that the great soldiers are generally not recognized as such on the outside. 

To conclude, we can say that Shaw’s play Arms and the Man is an anti-romantic comedy because, with his creative intellect and humour, Shaw dismisses the idealistic concept of love and war and reveals what they really are.