American Research Journal of English and Literature

This paper is an analysis of a poem by Felicia Hemans, a 19th century Romantic woman writer. Focusing on “The Bride of the Greek isle”, the study argues that Hemans death poems explore death as a means of freedom from the patriarchal society. It is not as some critics said that Hemans had morbid passion with death, or that her domesticity in her poems is unbearable. The paper, therefore, explores the journey of the bride, in the poem, as a journey towards freedom not death, using Freud’s psychoanalytical division of human’s mind into Id, Ego and Superego. Meanwhile, the study analyzes the images that Hemans used, and their significance to the study of women’s freedom through death. This paper shows that the three divisions of the narrative poem parallel in the structure the division of Freud’s human mind into Id, Ego, and Superego.