Item Details

abstract

The first portion of this work analyzes how Blake's The Book of Thel and Anne Waldman's Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born demonstrate the subjection and self-sacrificial position of one permanently confined to a single mode of being. Thanatos, or Freud's death drive, becomes an option for entrapped subjects like Thel, whose enlightenment depends upon a rupture from her original system. Routine and fear over motherhood builds into cataclysmic despair for Thel, despair that eventually makes action possible since these moments offer chances to learn to face her anxiety and obtain the knowledge she craves at the grave plot. Directly confronting horror and subduing it with the poet's voice replaces apprehension or passivity, allowing for levels of authority that may at last free the mind. I identify this kind of dependency on rupture or trauma in my own work as catalyst for the breakdown of identity and subsequent process of reconciliation within private space. Discovery of self-language becomes the affirmative agent, allowing the subject the opportunity to choose a personal mode of being and enable new ontological roles. The final portion turns to my own poetry as I reclaim the domestic as a site of psychological renovation, illustrating how tragedy allows poetic subjects the potential for new possibilities hidden within everyday life.

subject

Blake

Thanatos

Thel

trauma

Waldman

women

contributor

Gallo, Madeleine (author)

Catanzano, Amy (committee chair)

Holdridge, Jefferson (committee member)

Wilson, Eric (committee member)

date

2019-05-24T08:35:38Z (accessioned)

2021-05-23T08:30:12Z (available)

2019 (issued)

degree

English (discipline)

embargo

2021-05-23 (terms)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/93923 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

title

"The Frame of Her Eternal Dream": From Thel to Dreamscapes of Influence

type

Thesis