Although most of Wuthering Heights takes place indoors, readers sense that nature is a major element in the novel. Nature is present in figurative language, which accounts for the impression of realism, but why does Bronte choose an indirect mode of presentation over a direct one? The figurative uses of nature form a highly abstract symbolic system, distinct from “real” nature, while “real” nature is unrepresentable. Psychoanalytic theory may account for this discrepancy, if the text is treated as if it were a psyche. Nature, or the destructive reality it represents, is so threatening that it must be repressed, while the figurative use of nature is a sublimation, redirecting the dangerous force into a safe and constructive channel. Analysis of the heroine, Cathy, helps to confirm this reading. Similar forces are at work in her psyche, but unlike the author she cannot sublimate and succumbs to nature’s power.

Dickens progressively transforms the controlling conventions of Oliver Twist during the course of the novel to explore deeply rooted moral tensions involving innocence, evil, and the law. The opening satire degenerates into moralistic melodrama as Oliver changes from a typical parish boy to “the principle of Good.” But this sentimental Providentialism breaks down at the country funeral, and in the city the narrative form evolves to discover a more complex and humane morality. Although the plot remains occupied with the triumph of good, the symbolic pattern of the action suggests a hidden resemblance between Oliver and the thieves. The point of view moves toward closer identification with the harried, but increasingly humanized, criminals. The life of the novel resists repression even as the ending enforces the law. “The Parish Boy’s Progress” ends at the gallows, but Fagin takes Oliver’s place there.

In its obscure complexities, El obsceno pájaro de la noche conceals the tale of the Bildung of an author, which passes through four stages. In the first, the protagonist attempts to find his identity in society, symbolized by the mask. In the second, he turns to his own psychological resources, only to find chaos and monstrosity. In the third, like the figure of the old woman in the novel, he abandons his own individuality for hearsay and the commonplace. Finally, he ends in a solipsistic isolation represented by a nonce symbol, the Imbunche—a creature that has had all its orifices sewn shut by witches. This novel proposes that the author, who has become identified with language, has lost touch both with his inner self and with his ambience.

The Lucy poems were evoked by stress in Wordsworth’s relationships with Dorothy and Coleridge. Four were written in Germany, where Wordsworth was forced to separate from Coleridge because of the added expense of keeping Dorothy. Wordsworth’s resulting hostility toward Dorothy mixes with his love as he fantasizes her death and then mourns her loss in the Lucy poems. But his relationship with Coleridge darkened as well after Coleridge stated a preference for living near Thomas Poole rather than Wordsworth when the poets met at Göttingen following their winter-long separation. “I Travelled among Unknown Men,” written in England two years later, reveals, however, that Wordsworth overcame his ambivalence toward Dorothy and his excessive dependency upon Coleridge; his declaration of love for England becomes an indirect refusal to venture abroad with Coleridge again. Through the development of the Lucy cycle, Wordsworth discovered that place is the foundation of love and relationship.

Wallace Stevens uses the alphabet as a code to validate the philosophical concerns of his poetry. The alphabet is “murderous” if it represents a sacred and sterile process that assumes a final dispensation as “heavenly script”; the alphabet is “fusky” if it represents an artistic act that continually mediates between the emptiness of things and the imagination to create poetic heavens on earth. Stevens often works with an abbreviated alphabet (ABC, XYZ, etc.) where the letters are “characters” who represent certain relations between the imagination and reality. An understanding of this code informs certain poems where letters play an explicit and major role, such as “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch,” “Connoisseur of Chaos,” and “The Comedian as the Letter C.” The alphabetical code also informs much of Stevens’ other work and accounts for many of the apparent difficulties of his poetry—the curious vocabulary, the fantastic characters, and the exotic topography of his poetic universe.

Unlike some other plays of the Wakefield cycle, the Second Shepherds’ Play reveals a subtle exploitation of dramatic techniques to minimize the distance between secular and sacred experience. Introduction of the shepherds one at a time; Mak’s play-acting, magic spell, dream prophecy, and sheep stealing; the parallel between Mak and the Angel are all arranged to give the audience a sense in theatrical terms of the meaning of the shift through the farce-drama from the opening lyrics of static despair to a new mode of celebration. Although symbolically presented as the devil or Antichrist, Mak functions dramatically as the bridge to the birth of Jesus.

Molière’s Dom Juan goes beyond surface travesty of the legend to develop its profound comic sense. The hero’s failures in action are farcical; his failures in consciousness are antitragic. Dom Juan limits himself to the sensual perceptions of the present moment, thus becoming incapable of remorse or dread. The obvious presence and the repeated warnings of Divine Providence he ignores or treats with contempt. His willful continuation of a life of error, carried to the point of offering God as a scapegoat for his crimes, cuts him off from his virtuous ancestry and from the possibility of conversion. A series of miracles confirms his rejection of anagnorisis. The catastrophe of Dom Juan’s damnation includes the entire comic vision of the work in a mixture of the burlesque and the grotesque.

Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis—both in the specific way the myth is understood and, more important, in the poetic and conceptual forms in which it is cast—is rooted in the mythography of the sixteenth century. As in the attribute system of allegorical painting, the physical characteristics of Venus and Adonis reveal their histories and signify the alternately comic and serious qualities of love. The traditional plot has been scrapped, with sexual harmony replaced by strife and the poem turned into a continual debate over the nature of love. This debate is never resolved rationally. Instead, the multiple aspects of love are periodically condensed into unified images, which then generate further paradox: Venus versus Diana, freedom versus bondage, red versus white, fire versus water. This dialogue of images, a familiar iconographic technique, becomes a characteristically Shakespearean method of esthetic resolution, with conceptual relations to the primary forms of myth.

The sexual comedy of “L’Après-Midi d’un faune” reflects the sophisticated French taste of its times. As an “églogue,” however, Mallarmé’s poem has roots in the classical pastoral tradition. Various structural elements show that Mallarmé was consciously working within the boundaries of an established genre, and even suggest that he was at times involved in the direct imitation of classical models. Classical parallels are explored in order to discover how Mallarmé used and transformed traditional pastoral themes and material. A close examination of some of the extraordinarily ambiguous poetic language of Mallarmé’s eclogue reveals that the “Faune” can be read as a complex ironic version of pastoral, in which the poet embroiders on the theme of the analogy between writing poetry and making love.