With reference to the following: Shakespeare's Hamlet, Hughes' Birthday Letters, and McEwan's Atonement, compare the ways in which ideas about relationship breakdown are presented Hamlet, Birthday Letters and Atonement, although different in terms of narrative form and structure, are in many ways connected through the central theme of fractured relationships on which, arguably, the foundation of each text rests. Notions of betrayal permeate the texts of Shakespeare and McEwan with disastrous consequences for key characters, and although the same can be said for Hughes' birthday letters, the text is more poignant as the collection is not a work of fiction but a documentation of the "cosmic disaster" of his relationship with Plath. Although both were written in the late 20th century, Atonement and Birthday Letters share little similarity in their form, with Hughes choosing to write in the confessional in what it would be his last collection of poems and McEwan experimenting with the concept of the postmodern novel Comparisons can be made, however, when considering the confessional style that Hughes employs to convey his thoughts and the elaborate exploration of the psyche as we see it represented through. Hamlet's soliloquies. Interestingly, Freud considered Hamlet Shakespeare's “most modern play” and his analysis of Hamlet as a character played a vital role in clarifying the Oedipus complex despite the play being contextually rooted in the 16th century. . The sophistication of Atonement perhaps comes from its complex meta-narrative structure while, in contrast, Hamlet's structure is arguably more simplistic; the complexity comes from the moral confusion that Hamlet is seen struggling with throughout the play. Birthday Letters', by comparison, is ostensibly a reflection of 'real life', however, the events in the poems are reproduced in the context of the uncertainty of memory. The collection is undeniably, however, what Erica Wagner has called "one of the most intimate and personal collections of poetry ever written", making it "the best-selling volume of verse in the history of English poetry". Although broken relationships pervade all three texts, the way each writer chooses to recount the resulting events is different. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay A Consideration of Freud's Oedipus and Electra Complexes provides insight into the causes of relationship breakdown in both Hamlet and Birthday Letters, but cannot explain the fracturing of Briony and Cecilia's relationship in Atonement. A Freudian interpretation of Shakespeare's play suggests that the Oedipal desire Hamlet has for his mother prevents him from killing Claudius or forgiving Gertrude for marrying the king; his love for Gertrude makes it impossible for Hamlet to overcome the betrayal, allowing the relationship to fracture further until it becomes irreparable. As a counterpart to an Oedipal reading of Hamlet, the theory behind the Electra complex is useful when considering Plath's obsession with her father; at least from Hughes' point of view, one of the causes of the breakdown of his and Plath's relationship. After visiting Otto Plath's grave in Winthrop for the first time, Plath subsequently wrote the poem "Electra on Azealia Plath" and declared, "The day you died I went into the earth." The complex can be applied similarly to Hamlet as Freud's colleague Ernest Jones wrote in his study Hamlet and Oedipus "the son continually postpones the act of revenge due to the incredibly complicated psychodynamic situation in which he finds himself". The sceneof the wardrobe in Act III, the play's first dramatic climax, features a heated exchange between mother and son and reveals evidence of Hamlet's Oedipus complex; in his emotional description of “the rancid sweat of a bed steeped in corruption, love-making and love-making” we are privy to Hamlet's true disgust for his mother's sexual proclivities. His obsession with Gertrude's neglected "virtue", her "incestuous" relationship with Claudius, reveals a particularly complex mother-son relationship in which Hamlet seems to feel sexual jealousy as another man sleeps with Gertrude, fracturing the already fragile relationship. Although in Birthday Letters there is no idea, at least overtly, of any forbidden relationships between Plath and her father, Hughes' presentation of Plath highlights her obsession with him – the Electra complex – this becomes evident when the sexual partner male resembles his father. This is a concept that Hughes refers to in one of his later poems "Black Coat", in which he considers the idea of ​​Plath fusing her person with Otto where "the ghost's body and I, the blurred vision, have become a single focal point." ”. Towards the end of the poem Hughes uses accusatory language in his speech to Plath, which suggests that his sublimation of the idea of ​​the father with Hughes was intentional: "Did I not hear how, as your glasses tightened, he slipped into me". consideration of the Oedipus complex may also contribute in some way to explaining the procrastination to which Hamlet is subject until Act V; once again Earnest Jones' point of view here is interesting as it suggests that Hamlet's hatred towards Claudius stems from his unconscious identification with his uncle, in the sense that Claudius himself fulfilled Hamlet's wishes: to kill his father and marry his mother. It is notable, perhaps, that Hamlet finally manages to kill him in Scene II of Act V, significantly after Gertrude had been poisoned. In line with the theory, since Gertrude was the object of Hamlet's unconscious desire, her death allows Hamlet's strength and purpose to be reinvigorated as he no longer has to repress feelings, thus allowing him to enact his desires. Claudius is perceived in a completely negative way by Hamlet and in connection with this the negative imagery linked to Otto Plath in Birthday Letters similarly also reveals Hughes' anger towards Plath's father for being, according to him, the root of the their problems. Particularly in the poem "Portraits" where Hughes recalls the dark spot that the painter had drawn on Plath's shoulder while painting her portrait, which he believes to be Otto, he states: "I saw it with a horrible premonition, you were just there ...in some inaccessible dimension where that creature had you to himself.” Similarities can be drawn not only between Hughes's anger towards Otto and Hamlet's hatred towards Claudius, but also with Briony's unjustified portrayal of Robbie as a sexual deviant. Both Hughes and Hamlet believe that men are instrumental in the unraveling of their respective relationships and their dismay finds expression in sexual imagery. Hughes even goes so far as to accuse Otto of being an intruder in their marital bed in the poem "The Table." he huddled trembling between us… he had gotten what he wanted.’ In contrast, Briony realizes that it was not Robbie who caused the breakdown of her relationship with Cecilia, but her misunderstood view of him. Hughes also draws on the Greek notion of fatalism to explain the inevitability of Plath's death by believing that significant events and decisions are predetermined and therefore inevitable. The reader can perceive Hughes' reliance on astrology and fatalism as a useful toolto convince the reader that he was unable to help Plath from the beginning, Leonard Scigaj wrote in his article titled 'The Deterministic Ghost in the Machine of Birthday Letters' that "The aura of predestination is the strongest plot of the book .The poems find different ways to blame fate.” Interestingly, we see this view reflected in Hamlet; while Oedipus believed that his destiny to sleep with his mother and kill his father was preordained by the gods; Despite his uncertainty in avenging his Old Hamlet's death, Hamlet also appears to believe in a higher power that is responsible for his fate as he states to Horatio in Act V Scene II: "There is a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough them as we want. " This sense of one's preordained destiny is reflected in the poem "Ouija" in Birthday Letters. Here, Hughes recounts his and Plath's experimentation with the supernatural. Hughes recalls the disturbing response Plath received from their spirit they called 'Pan' when he was asked about her future: "Fame will come... you will have paid for it with your happiness, your husband and your life." This eerily accurate answer is difficult for the reader to believe, especially since the collection was written retrospectively after Plath's death, but this sense of predestination is reiterated later in the collection in "Horoscope": "You had only to look/ in the face of the closest metaphor... to see your father, your mother or me/ bringing you everything your destiny." According to Hughes and Hamlet, therefore, fate can be considered a motivating factor in the breakdown of relationships. Freud's notions of fatalism and the Oedipus complex, interesting as they may be, do not, by contrast, permeate Atonement; McEwan instead uses the metanarrative structure of the novel to explain the causes of the breakdown of the relationship between Briony and Cecilia. Using what Geoff Dyer called “the pale qualifiers and throwaway adverbs,” McEwan creates a languid setting in the first part in which we are transported into the mind of naive 13-year-old Briony. Although the novel is written in the third person, McEwan adopts Briony's perspective in the first part of the novel and her evocation is as convincing as the first-person narration of Hughes' and Hamlet's thought processes, as revealed in her soliloquies; the power of Briony's testimony allows the reader to understand or at least recognize why she chose to lie to the police resulting in Robbie's conviction. Briony's tendency to imagine and exaggerate could perhaps be considered the protagonist's fatal flaw that leads to the breakdown of relationships. In comparison to Plath and Hamlet's compulsions, Briony's "flaw" initially appears to be much less destructive until the epilogue where it is revealed that, partly due to her actions, both Cecilia and Robbie are dead. Her need to create drama "it was tempting for her to be dramatic and magical" leads her to ignore the truth she sees before her, what McEwan elegantly calls "burying her consciousness beneath her stream of consciousness." Brian Finney, a literary scholar, writes that "one of the major themes of Atonement is Briony's dangerous confusion between the worlds of fiction and nonfiction" which leads her to mistakenly accuse Robbie of raping Lola as she feels after the first "attack" on his sister. deserves to be punished “Now there was nothing left of the silent spectacle of the fountain beyond what survived in memory, in three separate and overlapping memories. The truth had become as ghostly as an invention.” The night of the accident fully exposes Briony's furtive imagination, but it is in the epilogue that McEwan reveals the meta-narrative structure, namely thatan elderly Briony is the narrator and has control over the events that unfold in what we consider her novel. In connection with Briony's overly fertile imagination and obsession with dramaturgy creating a dramatized fiction, in "Birthday Letters", Hughes refers to the "drama" he felt he was subject to, almost from the moment he met Plath. First noticed in "Visit," Hughes claims he "didn't know [he] was auditioning for the lead role in [his] drama." We see further evidence of this immediately afterwards in '18 Rugby Street', which for Hughes was a “scenotheque” in which Plath's “perpetual performance” took place. The imagery associated with the 'performance' almost becomes a motif in the poems of the collection. It is also in this poem that the idea of ​​the labyrinth is introduced. Early in the collection, Hughes intentionally positions Otto in the role of the “Minotaur,” using monstrous language to describe him as “the thing” and “the goblin.” By attributing animalistic qualities to him, Hughes can dehumanize Otto, allowing for easier charges. Likewise, both Briony and Hamlet portray male figures in the role of a "monster"; “There is something rotten in the state of Denmark,” Hamlet observes in the first scene of Act I in reference to Claudius' perceived machinations with Hamlet later referring to him as “that adulterous beast.” McEwan also draws on “beastly” imagery with Briony concluding that Robbie was a “maniac, a beast” after reading the explicit letter sent to Cecilia. In Birthday Letters Hughes begins to blame Otto Plath for the breakdown of their relationship by strategically placing Otto at the center of the labyrinth in the following poem "The Minotaur". In contrast, the elderly Briony recognizes that his obsession with fiction led directly to the breakdown of relationships with Cecilia and Robbie and her description of him as an "animalistic beast" was incorrect. Because Briony initially made Robbie the target of her fantasies, Hughes chooses to use Otto as a scapegoat; in his opinion the relationship between him and Plath broke down due to Otto's influence. Also in the poem "The Table" Hughes insinuates that Plath's reunion with her father through his work led to her death "you carved your letters to him, cursing and pleading." After experiencing the breakdown of a relationship in some way, all three protagonists develop certain characteristics through the process of self-evaluation. Hughes clearly has the advantage of hindsight – what Katha Pollitt calls “retrospective determinism” which in her view allows him to exonerate himself from any responsibility for Plath's suicide. Hughes is able to look back at events and re-evaluate them from the perspective of distance, for example as in the poem "The Table" where he recalls building Plath the writing desk on which she wrote her infamous poems "Ariel". He states "I didn't know I made and fitted a door/opening down into your father's tomb" demonstrating that in hindsight, he can see how, by encouraging Plath to channel feelings about Otto into her work, he allowed her to succumb to depression. who had tormented her since her father's death, effectively "leaving you to him". Hughes, however, does not admit the role he played in the breakdown of their relationship and does not even seem sorry, explaining instead that he now knows, thanks to the retrospective power of hindsight, what Plath was subjected to. This particular poem is placed towards the end of the loosely chronological collection, and by writing a few years after Plath's suicide, Hughes gave himself more time to evaluate his actions and the effect it had on his wife. Unlike previous poems such as "The Minotaur", in which he paints.