A Journey through Ages: Revisiting the Traumatized Female Characters in Glück's Poetry: A Study of Selected Poems
Alaa' Ahmed Abdullah
University of Tikrit \ College of Arts
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25130/Lang.8.5.14
Keywords: Glück, Caruth, PTSD, Trauma, Mythology, Religion
Abstract
In the majority of her poems, Louise Glück fixes a great deal of her attention on traumatized female characters that are taken from different historical periods mainly by relying on Greco-Roman myths. Peculiar to her poetry, the common ground that linked, links, and will link female figures through time is the unchanging fact of being traumatized. Glück's personal experience, which is deeply interwoven with these characters as she attempts to express not only her own trauma but the trauma of women in her time, will be explored and highlighted. In the selected poems, typically through two main recurring and excessively utilized mediums of expression namely religion and mythology, the presence of evidently traumatized female characters dominates the stage of her dramatized poetic setting.
The present study sheds light on PTSD theory pioneered by Cathy Caruth and will give a brief account of Louise Glück's life, her works, and style. It will analyze selected poems from Glück's poetry collection Poems 1962-2012 in the light of trauma theory. The showcased poems reveal how heavily Glück draws on mythology and religion as sources of her poetic output. These poems are Abishag, Persephone the Wonderer, Myth of Devotion, and Gretel in Darkness.
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