From Lucy to Lucia: Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor as Adapted by Donizetti (Published)
The paper explores the treatment of major female characters in three versions of the narratives most famously known as Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor: the original incident on which the novel was based, the novel itself, and the opera, Lucia di Lammermoor, composed by Gaetano Donizetti. Because of the popularity of Donizetti’s opera, a female character, Lucia, and Lucy in the novel version, is considered a central character in both narratives. However, the novel’s plot focuses on the male protagonist, Edgar Ravenswood, and his revenge story. In a novel with remarkably few female characters, it is striking that Lady Ashton; holds arguably, the most power in the narratives, contrasting starkly with Lucy’s relative feebleness. Through an examination of the respective narratives’ different though intersecting treatments of women’s desire, power, and madness, I argue that the opera’s Lucia gains a different kind of power through Lady Ashton’s madness.
Keywords: Madness, donizetti, the bride of lammermoor, walter scott, women’s power
Deconstruction of Psychic Issues in Plath’s Poetry (Published)
Sylvia Plath’s poetry offers a wide range of ideas and themes. The article uses Derridian deconstructive ideology to break up the meanings of the text and highlight the wide range of meanings it offers to the readers of different contexts. Deconstruction is the theory that challenges the centrality of any phenomenon and breaks up its structures to generate endless modes of signification. In this article, the study deconstructs Plath’s poems to generate a plurality of meanings related to human behaviors and psychology. It would be debated that various psychic states emerge in her poetry that resists any uniform reading of her poetry. It will be argued that deconstructing the text creates a multiplicity of meanings related to the human psyche and attitudes. This aspect of her work adds meaningfulness to her text and enables the readers to bring out a plurality of meanings associated with a particular mood and behavior. Carl Jung (1975) states that poetry is instrumental in understanding the psyche of the poet. The archetypal patterns and symbols that are recurrent in Plath’s poetry are the expressions of the psychic continual potential for transformation. Her themes are universal because they deal with the traumatic nature of human experience. That is the reason her poetry has influenced half a century after her committing suicide in February of 1963.