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Isolation In The Wife's Lament

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The Inexorable Result of Isolation The notion that isolation is the severest punishment is nothing new, but instead something that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times. As portrayed throughout “The Wife’s Lament,” this solitude often leads to a frenzy that results in the eternal desire for the unachievable. The most revealing thing, however, is the behavior in which people respond to this isolation. By the author's utilization of Freud's defense mechanisms in “The Wife’s Lament,” the wife’s rage in isolation is characterized as a separation from not only everyone encompassing her, but also reality as a whole. Concerning the most fundamental level of defenses, Freud states “dissociation from the ego entailed by the withdrawal of consciousness from whole tracts of …show more content…

Defining the nature of hysterical attacks, Freud shows that it is “essential for the explanation of hysterical phenomena to assume the presence of a dissociation, splitting of the content of consciousness.” The void of separation that leads to the complete division of reality is essentially responsible for the wife’s advancing hysteric nature. This point of hysteria is what allows her to completely believe that while she is yearning for her husband, he is also wishing for her. Eventually, the wife describes her state of isolation as being the hardest pain, “since I grew up, new or old, never more than now” (“The Wife’s Lament” 4-5). Her current position consists of infinite longing and crying, which has led to her dissociated, emotional state. This can all be drawn back to loneliness: the abandonment by her husband that caused her original sorrow, the forsaken quest for him that only led to discontent, and the failed journey that resulted in utter isolation. It was her original desire to be with the man that left her in the first place, with the fate of eternal solitude, that drove her to the hysterical state concealed as

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