Loving to death: An object relations interpretation of desire and destruction in William Wordsworth's Lucy poems

Abstract

W. R. D. Fairbairn's assertion that the schizoid dilemma is one in which the individual finds his love to be “bad” and seemingly destructive to his those he loves, helps explain the great depth of feeling embodied in William Wordsworth's Lucy poems. Furthermore, the unconscious emotions that can be uncovered in the Lucy poems corroborate Fairbairn's (1941) assertion that “internalization of objects is essentially a measure of coercion” (p. 111). The distant perspective from which the elusive Lucy is portrayed reveals the strength of the persona's unconscious fears that his coercive love will drain and destroy Lucy if he comes into sustained contact with her. In the poems, the persona's hungry love does just that, tragically annihilating Lucy and emptying the universe of her goodness, making permanent the loneliness foreshadowed in her distant elusiveness.

Keywords:

• Archetypal feminine
• Fairbairn
• genius loci
• Lucy poems
• object relations
• schizoid condition
• Wordsworth

Notes

1. Coleridge, letter of April 6, 1799 to Thomas Poole. See also Caraher, 1991, pp. 20–21, a helpful synopsis of the theories, including Bateson's, concerning Lucy's identity.