테드 휴즈 시에 나타난 불안과 멜랑콜리아

The Anxiety and Melancholia in Ted Hughes’s Poems

This paper examines Ted Hughes’s poetry in terms of anxiety and melancholia; how he depicts his unconscious agony and how he overcomes the symptoms of depression which were caused by the suicide of both Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill. This paper will argue that Hughes’s anxiety is about castration, a kind of psychological trauma that repeats like an incantation in the crow’s words. Moreover, the effect of depression and fear, rather than the mood of mourning in his poetry, is mediated through the voice of the black crow. To elaborate, its cynical tone can be seen as originating from Hughes’s depression and feelings and self-reproach. Through his regressive attitude to avoid trauma, I can find his symptom immersed in the narcissistic impulse. Even though the narcissistic identification is an illusion of the imaginary, his narcissistic attitude is defending the suicidal drive by leaning on the fantasy that he is the ideal ego of the imaginary. Like a fetus in the uterus, he indulges in absolute stability and warmth, but Oedipus’s mother is also brutally murdered in his poems. The cruel imagination of murdering the mother can be a delusional nature of self-punishment. But by expressing these psychological pressures and tensions in a poetic language, Hughes could have endured the depths of depression. The fantasy represented in his poems can function as a barrier to the collapse of his identity.