The “Mock Father’s Guilt” upon the Bleak Waste: The Crisis of the Paternal Metaphor and the Lacanian Real in William Wordsworth’s The Borderers
4th International UTAD Theatre Research Conference "Borders & Boundaries", İstanbul, Türkiye, 10 - 12 Eylül 2026, ss.15, (Özet Bildiri)
- Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
- Basıldığı Şehir: İstanbul
- Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.15
- Ankara Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
This study offers a novel historicist-psychoanalytic re-reading of William Wordsworth’s sole verse drama, The Borderers (1796–1797), by illuminating the structural isomorphism between the geopolitical vacancy of the thirteenth-century Anglo-Scottish border and the psychopathology of its central characters. Moving beyond traditional critical paradigms that view the play as either an ideological renunciation of William Godwin’s rationalism or a displaced biographical confession of revolutionary guilt, this paper utilizes Lacanian psychoanalysis to theorize the lawless Borders as a spatial manifestation of the Lacanian Real. It is argued that Wordsworth’s deliberate historiographical choice of the turbulent reign of Henry III functions as a precise typological mirror to the post-revolutionary trauma of 1793 France. By paralyzing the centralized authority of the Crown, this geographic border precipitates a catastrophic foreclosure of the Paternal Metaphor. In this non-symbolic wilderness, the traditional, benevolent Father of the Law, represented by the blind, dispossessed Baron Herbert, is systematically liquidated. Through a close textual analysis of Oswald’s foul device, the paper demonstrates how the antagonist deconstructs Marmaduke’s reality by framing Herbert as an Arch-Impostor. By weaponizing the spectral fantasy of the Obscene Father through allegations of Herbert’s "strange pleasures" and the commodification of Idonea, Oswald shatters the ultimate paternal prohibition, causing Marmaduke’s firm foundation to collapse. Paralyzed by this epistemological undoing and unable to directly shed blood, Marmaduke undergoes an impulsive, psychotic leap into action, abandoning the innocent Baron on the bleak Waste, savage Moor. Hence, the study repositions The Borderers as a sophisticated, proto-psychoanalytic diagnosis of the post-revolutionary condition, wherein the radical subject is condemned to a state of permanent subjective destitution symbolized by Marmaduke's eternal, melancholic wandering in the catastrophic wake of an encountered Real.