Title: “MAN IS RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS DESTINY” THE ABSENCE VERSUS THE REALIZATION OF SUBLIMATION IN THE LIVES OF MEN AND WOMEN IN AGNON’S “THE DOCTOR AND HIS EX-WIFE”
Authors: Dr. Carolyn Nicola, Israel
Abstract:

The purpose of this article is to describe significant representations in the relationships between men and women and to examine their meaning on two levels: the latent and the manifest, which characterize Agnon’s works and draw the reader to decipher their significance. In the first part, I aim to show that the representations of men and women oscillate between traditional and modern perceptions, revealing the gap present in Agnon, the religious writer who held conservative values, versus the implied author who expresses a modern stance through a psychological story about the processes of total love and jealousy as a mental illness. In many of Agnon’s stories, it is evident that the male character prefers a knowledgeable, challenging, and dominant woman over a weak woman whose submissiveness even elicits aversion and rejection from the man. In the second part, I will present the personality structure of the male narrator in the story, navigating a maze of relationships before, during, and after three years of marriage, which will help me present Agnon’s attitude towards the marriage- divorce system and the changes occurring in men versus women concerning the realization or absence of sublimation. I will argue that there is an absence of sublimation in the man during the marriage period, compared to its realization in the woman towards the request for a divorce and at the end of the story when the doctor is among the patients and calls Dina, “Nurse, nurse, come to me.” The methods of shaping the characters emphasize the theme of creation, love, and sublimation in the work and point to a process of psychological growth in Agnon’s heroines, also serving as agents of social change that continues to exist in modern literature and society here and now. In the third chapter, I will explain the intertextuality between Agnon’s story and the biblical story, where the biblical story of Dina thickens Agnon’s story. There are similarities and differences, and I will also address the possibilities of analyzing the sentence that closes the epilogue and opens the story, “Nurse, nurse, come to me,” which proves the lack of correction(sublimation) in the doctor.

Keywords: Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Sigmund Freud, Sublimation, Male Character, Female Character, Implied Author, Role Of The Dream, Intertextuality.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59009/ijlllc.2024.0080
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