With reference to the following: Shakespeare's Hamlet, Hughes's Birthday Letters, and McEwan's Atonement, compare and contrast the ways in which ideas about the breakdown of relationships are presented Hamlet, Birthday Letters and Atonement, although diverse in terms of form and narrative structure, are linked in many ways by the central theme of the fracture of relationships on which rests, arguably, the foundation of each text. Notions of betrayal permeate Shakespeare's and McEwan's texts with disastrous consequences for key characters, and while the same can be said for Hughes's birthday letters, the text is more poignant because the collection is not a work of fiction but a documentation of Hughes. cosmic disaster” of his relationship with Plath. Although both were written in the late 20th century, Atonement and Birthday Letters share few similarities in form, with Hughes choosing to write confessionally in what was to be his final collection of poetry and McEwan experimenting with the concept of post-modern novel. Comparisons can, however, be made by considering the confessional style that Hughes employs to convey his thoughts and the elaborate exploration of the psyche as we see it represented through Hamlet's soliloquies. Interestingly, Freud considered Hamlet to be Shakespeare's "most modern play" and his analysis of Hamlet as a character played a vital role in elucidating the Oedipus complex, although the play was contextually rooted in the 16th century. The sophistication of Atonement perhaps comes from its complex meta-narrative structure while, on the other hand, the structure of Hamlet is undoubtedly more simplistic; the complexity comes from the moral confusion that Hamlet struggles with throughout the play. In comparison, Birthday Letters is ostensibly a reflection of "real life", however, the events of the poems are replayed against the backdrop of the uncertainty of memory. The collection is undeniably, however, what Erica Wagner has called "one of the most intimate and personal collections of poems ever written", making it "the best-selling volume of verse in the history of the English poetry. Although relationship breakdown permeates all three texts, the way each writer chooses to recount the resulting events is diverse. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on 'Why violent video games should not be banned'? Get an original essay A consideration of Freud's Oedipus and Electra complexes provides insight into the causes of relationship breakdown in Hamlet and the Birthday Letters, but she can't explain the fracture of Briony and Cecilia's relationship in Atonement. A Freudian interpretation of Shakespeare's play suggests that Hamlet's Oedipal desire for his mother prevents him from killing Claudius or forgiving Gertrude for marrying the king; his love for Gertrude makes the betrayal impossible for Hamlet to overcome, allowing the relationship to fracture further until it becomes beyond repair. As a counterpart to an Oedipal reading of Hamlet, the theory behind the Electra complex is useful when considering Plath's obsession with her father; at least according to Hughes, this was one of the causes of the breakdown of his relationship with Plath. After visiting Otto Plath's grave in Winthrop for the first time, Plath then wrote the poem "Electra on Azealia Plath" and said: "The day you died I went into the earth. " The complex can also apply to Hamlet, as Freud's colleague Ernest Jones wrote in his study Hamlet and Oedipus: "the son continually postpones the act of revenge because of the situationincredibly complicated psychodynamic he finds himself in.” The closet scene of Act III, the play's first dramatic climax, features a heated exchange between mother and son and reveals evidence of Hamlet's Oedipal complex; in his moving description of "the fetid sweat of a bed bagged and simmering with corruption, cherishing and making love", we are privy to Hamlet's genuine disgust at his mother's sexual proclivities. His obsession with Gertrude's neglected "virtue" and her "incestuous" relationship with Claudius reveals a particularly complex mother-son relationship where Hamlet appears to experience sexual jealousy to the extent that another man sleeps with Gertrude, fracturing the already fragile relationship . Although there is no notion in Birthday Letters, at least overtly, of forbidden relationships between Plath and her father, Hughes's presentation of Plath highlights her obsession with him – the Electra complex – which becomes evident when the male sexual partner resembles the father. This is a concept Hughes refers to in one of his later poems "Black Coat", in which he considers the idea of ​​Plath merging her own character with Otto where "the ghost's body and I, the blurred transparency, have become a single point. ". Towards the end of the poem, Hughes uses accusatory language in his speech to Plath, suggesting that his sublimation of the idea of ​​the father with Hughes was intentional: "I did not feel how, as your lenses narrowed, he slipped into me.” taking into account the Oedipus complex can also partly help to explain the procrastination to which Hamlet is subjected until Act V; Again, Earnest Jones's point of view here is interesting in that it suggests that Hamlet's hatred of Claudius comes from his unconscious identification with his uncle, in the sense that Claudius himself realized the own Hamlet's desires - to kill his father and marry his mother. It is perhaps remarkable that Hamlet is finally able to kill him in Act V Scene II, long after Gertrude has been poisoned. In accordance with the theory, as Gertrude was the object of Hamlet's unconscious desire, her death allows Hamlet's strength and purpose to be reinvigorated as he no longer has to repress his feelings, thus allowing him to realize his desires. Claudius is viewed entirely negatively by Hamlet and, related to this, the negative images linked to Otto Plath throughout The Birthday Letters also reveal Hughes' anger towards Plath's father for being, he believes, the root of their problems. Notably in the poem “Portraits” where Hughes recalls the dark spot that the painter had drawn on Plath's shoulder while he was painting her portrait, which he believes to be that of Otto. He states: “I saw it with a horrible presentiment, you were alone there… in some inaccessible dimension where this creature had you all to itself. Similarities can not only be drawn between Hughes's anger towards Otto and Hamlet's hatred towards Claudius, but also with Briony's unwarranted portrayal of Robbie as a sexual deviant. Both Hughes and Hamlet believe that men are instrumental in destroying their respective relationships, and their dismay finds expression in sexual imagery. Hughes even goes so far as to accuse Otto of being an intruder into their marital bed in the poem “The Table”: “he huddled shivering between us…he had gotten what he wanted. » In contrast, Briony understands that it was not Robbie who caused the breakdown of her relationship with Cecilia but her own misinterpreted view of him. Hughes also draws on the Greek notion of fatalism to explain the inevitability of Plath's death by believing that important events and decisionsbeen predetermined and are therefore inevitable. The reader may perceive Hughes's reliance on astrology and fatalism as a useful tool to convince him that he was incapable of helping Plath from the beginning, Leonard Scigaj wrote in his article titled "The Deterministic Ghost in the Machine birthday letters” that “The aura of predestination is the strongest texture in the book. The poems find different ways of accusing fate. Interestingly, this view is reflected in Hamlet; while Oedipus believed that his destiny, that of sleeping with his mother and killing his father, had been predetermined by the gods; on this subject, despite his uncertainty about avenging the death of his old Hamlet, Hamlet also seems to believe in a higher power responsible for his fate, as he asserts to Horatio in scene II of act V: "There is a deity who shapes our ends, / Outline them as we will. "This feeling that our destiny is predetermined is reflected in the poem "Ouija" in Birthday Letters. Here, Hughes recounts his and Plath's experimentation with the supernatural. Hughes recalls the disturbing response Plath received from their spirit that they named "Pan" when asked about his future: "Fame will come...you will have paid for it with your happiness, your husband and your life. This strangely accurate ethereal answer is difficult for the reader to believe." , especially since the collection was written retrospectively after Plath's death, but this feeling of predestination is reiterated later in the collection in "Horoscope", "It was enough to look/into the face of the most metaphor." close… to see your father, your mother or me/ bring you all your destiny' According to Hughes and Hamlet, destiny can therefore be seen as a motivating factor in the breakdown of relationships The notions of fatalism and Oedipus of. Freud, as interesting as they are, do not, on the other hand, permeate the Atonement; McEwan instead uses the metanarrative structure of the novel in order to explain the causes of the breakdown of the relationship between Briony and Cecilia. Using what Geoff Dyer called "pale qualifiers and throwaway adverbs", McEwan creates a languid setting in the first part where we are transported into the mind of naive 13-year-old Briony. Although the novel is written in the third person, McEwan adopts Briony's point of view in the first part of the novel and her evocation is as compelling as the first person account of Hughes and Hamlet's thought processes, as revealed his monologues; the power of Briony's will allows the reader to understand or at least recognize why she chose to lie to the police, resulting in Robbie's conviction. Briony's tendency to imagine and exaggerate could perhaps be seen as the protagonist's fatal flaw that leads to the breakdown of relationships. In comparison to the compulsions of Plath and Hamlet, Briony's "flaw" initially seems much less destructive until the epilogue where it is revealed that, in part because of her actions, Cecilia and Robbie are dead. Her need to create drama "it was a temptation for her to be dramatic and magical" leads her to ignore the truth she sees before her, which McEwan elegantly calls "burying her consciousness under her stream of consciousness" . Brian Finney, a literary scholar, writes that "a major theme of Atonement is Briony's dangerous mixing of the worlds of fiction and non-fiction", leading her to falsely accuse Robbie of the rape of Lola, as she feels after the first “attack” on her sister. he deserves to be punished “All that remained of the silent spectacle of the fountain was what survived in memory, in three distinct and overlapping memories. The truth had become as ghostly as ainvention. The night of the incident fully exposes Briony's furtive imagination, but it is the epilogue where McEwan reveals the meta-narrative structure, whereby an elderly Briony is the narrator and controls the events that unfold in what we come to consider it as its own novel. In connection with Briony's overly fertile imagination and his obsession with playwriting creating dramatized fiction, Hughes refers, throughout "Birthday Letters", to the "drama" to which he felt subjected, almost from the when he met Plath. First noted in “Visit,” Hughes said he “didn’t know he was auditioning for the lead role in his drama.” We see further evidence of this soon after in "18 Rugby Street", which for Hughes was a "stage" where Plath's "perpetual performance" was played out. The imagery associated with “performance” becomes almost a motif in the poems in the collection. It is also in this poem that the idea of ​​the labyrinth is introduced. Early in the collection, Hughes deliberately positions Otto in the role of the "Minotaur" by using monstrous language to describe him as "the thing" and "the goblin". By granting him animal qualities, Hughes can dehumanize Otto, allowing for an easier accusation. Similarly, both Briony and Hamlet played male characters in the role of a “monster”; “There is something rotten in the State of Denmark,” Hamlet observes in the first scene of Act I in reference to Claudius' perceived machinations, with Hamlet later describing him as “that adulterous beast.” McEwan also draws on "bestial" imagery, with Briony concluding that Robbie was a "maniac, a beast" after reading the explicit letter sent to Cecilia. In Birthday Letters, Hughes begins to blame Otto Plath for the breakdown of their relationship by strategically placing Otto at the center of the maze in the later poem "The Minotaur". In contrast, old Briony recognizes that his obsession with fiction directly led to the breakdown of relationships with Cecilia and Robbie and that her description of him as an "animal beast" was incorrect. As Briony initially made Robbie the target of her fantasies, Hughes chooses to use Otto as a scapegoat; in his opinion, his relationship with Plath broke down due to Otto's influence. Also in the poem "The Table", Hughes insinuates that Plath's reconnection with her father through his work led to his death "you burned your letters to him, cursing him and pleading with him." After experiencing the breakdown of a relationship in one form or another, the three protagonists develop certain characteristics through the process of self-evaluation. Hughes clearly benefits from hindsight – what Katha Pollitt calls a “retrospective determinism” which she says allows her to absolve herself of responsibility for Plath's suicide. Hughes is able to look back on events and reevaluate them from the perspective of distance, for example as in the poem "The Table" in which he remembers building Plath the writing table on which she wrote her famous poems “Ariel”. He states "I didn't know I made and installed a door/opening down into your father's grave", showing that in hindsight he can see how by encouraging Plath to channel her feelings about 'Otto in his work allowed him to succumb to depression. who had tormented her since her father's death, "leaving her to him". Hughes, however, does not admit the role he played in the breakdown of their relationship and does not even appear to apologize, instead explaining that he now knows, through the power of hindsight, what Plath was subjected to. This particular poem is placed towards the end of the loosely chronological collection and written a few years after the.