Matthew Arnold Essay

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sundra Segan Wheeler’s scholarly article “The motive of return in Matthew Arnold’s writings,” she discusses Arnold’s passions and drives towards writing, taking influence from important literary figures such as Aristotle and Voltaire. Wheeler compares Arnold to the writer Longinus, who “interweaves language of his own with that of the authors he admires,” making him very much a product of his influences. Wheeler then goes into an in depth examining of Arnold’s writing. “Arnold, the poetic craftsman, is commenting on the reductive nature of broad-based praise” in works like “Merope,” and Arnold also “advises his reader to establish a willed pattern of return.” Return, in this context, means return to the mother, of childhood, to the womb, in essence. Arnold’s works are perpetually about the human need to be safe and return to the simplicity of our childhood and home, which “Merope” and “The Buried Life” help to express. Much is made of Arnold’s attempts to subvert and play with classical tragic form. The myth of Merope is one prominent example, as he seeks to penetrate the form of the work and transform it, allowing “everything else to follow” and fall into place. Wheeler states that Arnold feels it is important to have a closer connection with the unconscious in their writings, which can be conveyed by playing with ancient stories and myths, as they can tap into unrecognized feelings and emotions for the writer and audience alike. Wheeler brings Freud in to the conversation, discussing the Oedipus complex as one way to look at return through the eyes of Matthew Arnold. As return, for Arnold, can be seen as “the Oedipal scene,” the writer can often be terrified of presenting that context. “Art appears to be designed, in part, to mask shame,” says Wheeler, as the goal of writers, according to Arnold, is to convey that desire for returning to such a
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