著者

大住 有里子

出版者

サイコアナリティカル英文学会

雑誌

サイコアナリティカル英文学論叢 (ISSN:03866009)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2003, no.24, pp.1-12,75, 2003 (Released:2011-03-11)

参考文献数

13

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It is often said that Shakespeare's works contain many contradictions and I cite as an example Witches' words in Macbeth; Fair is foul and foul is fair. Many scholars has discussed what this phrase means for a long time, and this question doesn't reach one answer but it allows us to interpret in some ways, which usually happens in Shakespeare's works. Sonnets has also many contradictions. In this paper I pick up Sonnets 127 and 130 to see the contradictions.Sonnets 127 and 130 belong to a series of sonnets the poet composes for a lady and she is known as Dark Lady. Her complexion being dark and her hair being black, Dark Lady stands far from the beauty of those days, whose hair is blonde and complexion is fair. Despite of her being opposite from general beauty or because of her being so, the poet praises the lady in his sonnets. The lady is regarded as foul not fair but she is transferred to fair by means of the poet's skills. I try to explain how the poet succeeds the transference of the lady, taking up three points; logic, ambiguity, and psychoanalysis.The poet enumerates the lady's faulty points by making contrast to the conventional poetic skill, that is hyperbole. The more he writes the lady' s lack of the conventional attributes, the more the lady seems beautiful. This is the poet's logic. As for ambiguity, I pay attention to the word “damasked roses” in Sonnet 130. Damasked rose is often used as a hyperbole which expresses females' cheeks, but ‘damasked roses’ can make readers imagine females' cheeks with cosmetics. Then when the poet says the lady' s cheeks are nothing like ‘damasked roses, ’ he gives evidence of the lady's being natural without cosmetics while the other ladies insult Nature using cosmetics, and again the lady comes from foul to fair. To examine the sonnets psychoanalytically, I refer to and quote from Freud's ‘Repression’ and ‘Negation.’ Sonnet 130 is a kind of negation of the lady' s beauty though the couplet says the lady is beautiful. Behind the negation there must be the poet's real love. I think sonnet 130 contains the poet' s double negation. One is his performance as a poetic skill and the other is the poet's real negation, from which we can inspect the mechanism of his unconsciousness. He loves the lady but this love is accompanied with discomfort, because nobody can sympathize with his love to her. In order to avoid discomfort, the poet pushes his love from consciousness to unconsciousness. In this process the negation appears in front of us as a kind of the repression. I examining sonnets 127 and 130 psychoanalytically, some hints show up which lead us to understand the existence of the two lovers, the lady and the youth at the same time in the latter part of Sonnets.