Hamlet’s Displacement as a Recurrent Case in Cather’s A Lost Lady and Al Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land

Freudian neurosis, despite being a psychological disorder rather than a literary topic, has been used in literature to conceptualise characters’ suffering. Freud contends that the suppression of desires due to hidden and unhidden causes leads to neurosis. Being unable to succeed in life, individuals feel neurotic and tend to displace their frustrations onto other persons or objects. Starting with the Renaissance, this article explores how displacement in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is tacitly approached and how this reaction has become a recurrent case in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady (1923) and Laila Al Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007). The article analyses the incentives of neurosis in each work, how these reasons lead to the onset of displacement and how literary works share relatively similar implications about displacement despite being about different issues.

A Lost Lady: A Narrative of Manifest Destiny and Neocolonialism

The greatly examined story of A Lost Lady usually depicts Mrs. Forrester’s success in meeting and adapting to the challenges of a changing world, a world characterized by materialism and self-fulfilment. However, the overlooked story, one far more disturbing than the privileged story in the text, is the narrative of oppressed groups of people of other races and the lower class. Drawing on some aspects of postcolonial theory, this paper explores Willa Cather’s own reactions to real changes in her society, to the waning power of imperialism, and of her nostalgic longing for the western prairies of her youth, without showing any sympathy for the dispossessed Native Americans and other oppressed races. It will also disclose the unmistakable colonial overtones, which remarkably resonate with the common discourse of “Manifest Destiny” during the time period of American expansion to the Wild West.

Dismantling the Patriarchal Hierarchy in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady

This research paper is focused on how Willa Cather portrays the inner rebellion and the passion of a female character, Marian Forrester in her novel A Lost Lady. She walks against the social norms and she is presented as a rigid character who dismantles the male created hierarchy woman as a subordinate being in the society. Though she is married and living happily with her husband, somewhere deep down in her heart she is not happy with her husband. Marian seems to transcend her husband’s order. At that time female were not allowed to enjoy their freedom like the males. Marian goes against male hegemony and to create her separate identity. As a qualitative research, by using radical feminism as a tool of interpretation, the researcher collected textual evidenced from Cather’s novel and interpreted them to fulfill the objective of this research. This research concludes that Cather’s Marian has dismantled the social hierarchy created by the male superiority or patriarchy in the novel.

Dismantling the Patriarchal Hierarchy in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady

This research paper is focused on how Willa Cather portrays the inner rebellion and the passion of a female character, Marian Forrester in her novel A Lost Lady. She walks against the social norms and she is presented as a rigid character who dismantles the male created hierarchy woman as a subordinate being in the society. Though she is married and living happily with her husband, somewhere deep down in her heart she is not happy with her husband. Marian seems to transcend her husband’s order. At that time female were not allowed to enjoy their freedom like the males. Marian goes against male hegemony and to create her separate identity. As a qualitative research, by using radical feminism as a tool of interpretation, the researcher collected textual evidenced from Cather’s novel and interpreted them to fulfill the objective of this research. This research concludes that Cather’s Marian has dismantled the social hierarchy created by the male superiority or patriarchy in the novel.