For My Death Father Poem Analysis

Jung believes that a writer’s treatment of universal archetypes is negotiations with cultural norms: Therein is the social significance of art: it is constantly at work and it is the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which age is lacking. Further Jung in his animus and anima says that every man carries with him the eternal image of woman; the woman too has her inborn image of man.(Jung-80-83) Jennings exceeds it by daring a lyric persona that blends and speaks for everyman and every woman. On a personal level, Jennings recorded dreams of being a boy in search of a mother and father and of a third sex ‘neither wholly masculine nor feminine but partaking of both’. This ambivalence of sex and gender is manifest in her too familiar conflict

As she puts: “My relationship with my father was a strange one. In my extreme childhood, he was a remote and much revered figure. As I grew older and saw more of him, he became rather a frightening person (Jennings, “Autobiography”) In the poems and elegies she wrote after his death she confronts after his death confronts the ambivalence of her feelings about him. In the final lines of one of these poems, “For My Death Father,”“she creates an image which evokes a sense of their troubled relationship. “There was love now I see of a strange kind./We could move about in each other’s mind”(Jennings, TCP 261).

Jennings claims that her sister, who was two years older, “got on with him better, but even she at times went in great awe of him”(10) As with the portrait of her father, the portrait of her sister is more vividly realized in a poem, “For My Sister” .In this poem, Jennings uses her older sister’s remembered assertion :“I’m too old to play with you any more” to definite herself in relation to her sister in the past and in the present:

“I’m too old ……” you do not seem so

What do different feminist perspectives offer as alleviation?” argues that by labeling British women’s mental health distress and treatment in terms of a purely medical model ,fundamental contributory social structures have been greatly ignored by the male psychiatrists. This labeling is historically rooted in the pathologisation of the feminine condition and so women’s mental health is a social construct and a result of the patriarchal society. According to him in order to explore a way to mental health distress – a term used by MIND to emphasize the inorganic origins of many mental problems labels need to be unmasked and emphasis placed upon the socio economic context of women’s life. Halliday in his essay has included an extract from Jennings’s poem “The Interrogator” as he believes that literature can offer the best portrayal of suffering involved in mental ill