COLERIDGE'S SEXUAL DESIRE IN THE POEM 'KUBLA ..., Summaries of Negotiation

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COLERIDGE’S SEXUAL DESIRE

IN THE POEM ‘KUBLA KHAN’

A THESIS

BY:

GESANG MANGGALA

ST. N 120210414

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

FACULTY OF LETTERS

AIRLANGGA UNIVERSITY

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COLERIDGE’S SEXUAL DESIRE

IN THE POEM ‘KUBLA KHAN’

A THESIS

Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Sarjana degree of the English Department Faculty of Letters, Airlangga University Surabaya

BY:

GESANG MANGGALA

ST. N 120210414

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

FACULTY OF LETTERS

AIRLANGGA UNIVERSITY

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Approved to be examined Surabaya, 3 January 2007

Thesis advisor,

Dra. Christinawati NIP. 131 459 657

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

FACULTY OF LETTERS

AIRLANGGA UNIVERSITY

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This thesis has been accepted and examined by the board of examiners of English Department Faculty of Letters, Airlangga University

The examiners are:

1.

Diah Ariani Arimbi, Ph.D. NIP. 132 086 387

2.

Dra. Christinawati NIP. 131 459 657

3.

Lina Puryanti, S.S., M.Hum. NIP. 132 205 667

4.

Drs. Amir Fatah, M.Hum. NIP.

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goes for my best pals, without you all, my days would not be so wonderful! All of you have taught me the meaning of friendship, and accept me as the way I am; a million thanks will never be enough to show how grateful I am. I do hope that our friendship and brotherhood would last forever, thank you.

Surabaya, 1 January 2007 The Writer,

Gesang Manggala

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“all we have to decide is what to do with the time which is given to us” (Gandalf –

‘The Lord of the Rings – The Fellowship of the Ring’)

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• 2.1. The Structure of Personality…………………………………………
  • 2.1.a. Conscious, Preconscious, and Unconscious……………...……
  • 2.1.b. The Id, Ego, and Super-ego……………………………………
• 2.2. The Dynamics of Personality………………………………………..
  • 2.2.a. The Instincts…………………………………………………...
  • 2.2.b. The Defense Mechanism………………………………………
• 2.3. The Personality Development……………………………………….
• CHAPTER III: ANALYSIS…………………………………………………..….
  • 3.1. Illustration of the Poem 'Kubla Khan'………………………….……
  • 3.2. The Meaning of the Poem 'Kubla Khan'……………….……………
    • 3.2.a. Pleasure-Dome…………………………...……………..……..
    • 3.2.b. Fountain…………………………………………..…….……..
    • 3.2.c. Caverns………………………………….……………….…….
    • 3.3.d. Chasm…………………………………………………..……...
    • 3.3.e. River…………………………………………………….……..
  • 3.3. The Relation of the Poem and the Poet’s Sexual Desire……….……
• CHAPTER IV: CONCLUSION…………………………………………………
• Bibliography…………………………………………………………………......

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ABSTRACT

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 'Kubla Khan' is one of the most controversial poems, and it is an example of expressing one’s feeling through a literary work, in this case, the poet’s. The psychological factors of the poet have driven him to compose the poem. Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis will be applied in order to analyze the psychological motives that lay behind the composing of the poem. The failure in one of the stages of personality development has caused the poet to keep his sexual desire repressed in his unconscious. The amount of the repressed desire is kept increasing so that somehow it has to be released. This is where the poet’s id , ego , and super-ego play their roles and negotiate for the best solution. The result of the negotiation is the poem 'Kubla Khan'. The study will be focusing to give description on the illustration of the poem, to analyze the meaning of the poem, and to expose the relation of the poem and the poet’s sexual desire.

Literary works are said to be the reflection or representation of life, especially human’s life. This includes the persons within the life itself. A literary work also reflects and portrays the feeling within every person: joy, sadness, desire, trauma, hatred, anger, etc. People will find that literary works can be so hilarious, amusing, pitying, even frightening and seducing. The reason why is that literary works are somewhat written to be very close to the readers, so that they are able to feel what the characters felt in the story. But one thing that is also important dealing with a literary work is the fact that a literary work itself can be the reflection or expression of the writer himself or herself. An Austrian psychologist, Sigmund Freud, developed a theory known as the Psychoanalysis. This theory suggests that there is a part of human psyche which is called the realm of the unconscious. Unconscious consists of thoughts, fears, desires, which are unrealized yet give strong influences toward humans’ behavior. Those repressed feelings (mostly because they are not accepted in the society) find their way of expression through the ways that are more acceptable, such as dreams, ‘slips of the tongue’, jokes, fantasies and also works of art, including literary works. One example of the use of literary works as the means to express the repressed feelings can be seen in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous unfinished poem entitled ‘Kubla Khan’. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary, Devonshire, on 21 October 1772 as the youngest son of the vicar of Ottery St Mary. After his father's death Coleridge was sent away to Christ's Hospital School in London. He also studied at Jesus College. In Cambridge, Coleridge met the radical, future poet

laureate Robert Southey. He moved with Southey to Bristol to establish a community, but the plan failed. In 1795 he married the sister of Southey's fiancée Sara Fricker, whom he did not really love. Coleridge's collection Poems On Various Subjects was published in 1796, and in 1797 appeared Poems. In the same year he began the publication of a short- lived liberal political periodical The Watchman. He started a close friendship with Dorothy and William Wordsworth, one of the most fruitful creative relationships in English literature. From it resulted Lyrical Ballads , which was opened with Coleridge's ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and ended with Wordsworth's ‘Tintern Abbey’. These poems set a new style by using everyday language and fresh ways of looking at nature. Disenchanted with political developments in France, Coleridge visited Germany in 1798-99 with Dorothy and William Wordsworth, and became interested in the works of Immanuel Kant. He studied philosophy at Göttingen University and mastered the German language. At the end of 1799 Coleridge fell in love with Sara Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth's future wife, to whom he devoted his work ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1802). During these years Coleridge also began to compile his Notebooks, recording the daily meditations of his life. In 1809-10 he wrote and edited with Sara Hutchinson the literary and political magazine The Friend. From 1808 to 1818 he gave several lectures, chiefly in London, and was considered the greatest of Shakespearean critics. In 1810 Coleridge's friendship with Wordsworth came to a crisis, and the two poets never fully returned to the relationship they had earlier.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, suffered from an illness, and he used opium as the treatment for his illness because opium was legal at that time. Soon, he became addicted with it. Many experts belief that at the time Coleridge wrote this poem, he was under the influence of opium. The history of Coleridge’s love life is not a kind of sweet memory that is worth to be recalled. Coleridge married Sara Fricker, a woman whom he did not love; and fell in love with Sara Hutchinson, a woman whom he could not marry. Love has a very close correlation with sex, because it is said to be the biological pronouncement of love. Coleridge’s failure in love had also brought him into a failure in sexual life. This is where Maslow’s and Freud’s theory play their role. As a human being, Coleridge could not just throw away his sexual desire, one of the Physiological Needs. This sexual need, which could not be fulfilled, had become a big pile in Coleridge’s unconsciousness. Through this thesis, the writer would like to see if there is any relation between the poem and Coleridge’s sexual desire, and whether or not the poem is the representation of Coleridge’s sexual desire.

B. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEMS In order to analyze the poet’s repressed desire that is presented in the poem, the writer of the study would like to state three questions to elaborate his analysis:

1. What does the poem illustrates?
2. What is the meaning conveyed in the poem?

3. How does the meaning relate to the poet’s sexual desire and how does the poem express it?

C. OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY Regarding to the statements of the problem, the aim of the analysis of the thesis are:

1. To describe the illustration of the poem
2. To expose the real meaning conveyed in the poem
3. To elaborate the relation between the meaning of the poem and the poet’s sexual desire, and the way the meaning expresses that desire.

D. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY People have seen lots of literary works in their everyday lives; each of them has their own style, character, or even perhaps color and flavor. Those qualities distinguish one literary works from another. However, the style, and all that have been mentioned above, of a literary work cannot be separated from the author. The author is the one who wrote it, thus he or she has the largest control over it. The author’s background, beliefs, ideology, even gender may interfere within the work. Through this study, the writer wishes to present a sample of how far the background of the author may affect his or her work. The writer of the study would also hope that this study would become a worthy addition amongst all the study about ‘Kubla Khan’ and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Later in his theory, Freud also mentiones that a human is compiled by a complex system of energy, including this repressed desire, and cannot be separated from the Law of Thermodynamics, determining that energy can only be transformed but the amount will not be changed. When a person forget about something, that thing does not really disappear, it is just changed into something different and put in the realm of unconscious. There are times when the unconscious is too full with all the repressed things (whether it is a desire or trauma). And when this happens, the unconscious will desperately seek for a way to release its ‘burdens’ in order to maintain the balance of energy inside a person.

G. METHOD OF THE STUDY The corpus of the study is the poem entitled ‘Kubla Khan’ which is written by one of the famous romantic poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The method that is used by the writer in doing his analysis is the library research, and the main source is the poem itself. The writer will also use other literatures as well as online sources in order to provide sufficient supports to elaborate the study. Other method that will also be used by the writer is data collecting. All the data will be taken from the content of the poem. The data collecting will be done by having a close reading of the text, making the data classification and selecting the data that can be related with Coleridge’s sexual desire in the poem, especially nouns that produce sexual sensation. Later on, the data will be analyzed with the assumption that the meaning of the poem can be delivered with the

reader’s own interpretation, supported with other texts concerning the same subject. In doing his analysis, the writer will use the descriptive interpretative method. The data that have been collected will be analyzed using the theories; and from the analysis, the writer will give descriptive explanation so that it will be clear to the readers that the data taken from the poem are related with and express the manifestation of the poet’s repressed desire.

H. ORGANIZATION OF THE PAPER The first chapter of the paper consists of background of the study, statement of the problems, objectives of the study, significance of the study, scope and limitation, theoretical background, method of the study, organization of the paper, and definition of key terms. The second chapter will elaborate the theoretical framework of the study. Then, the third chapter will be focusing on the analysis to answer the problems stated in the first chapter. The fourth chapter will summarize and conclude the entire study.

I. RELATED STUDIES Many writings and critics have been made concerning the poem 'Kubla Khan' by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Some of the critics are J. A. Howard with his article entitled Sex, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll , Reuven Tsur with his essay Kubla Khan and the Implied Critic,s Decision Style , and Robert Gale with his