The Representation of the Neurotic Mind in Mary Julia Young’s Sonnet “Anxiety”

Abstract

18th-century poet and novelist Mary Julia Young was a prolific writer supporting herself by writing. She remained a biographically obscure literary figure, yet her remarkable life with the experience of anxiety drew attention through her poetic discourse and narrative. Hence, having earned her living from literature, Young had to stick to the demands of the era's literary fashions. Therefore, this paper investigates the clues and signs of the author's real experience and analyses Young's sonnet "Anxiety" in terms of the representation of the neurotic mind and anxiety. The paper categorizes the type of anxiety and the subjective experience of the poetic persona as mood and disorder. The study suggests that the implied author experiences neurosis as character neurosis whereas the historical author suffers from situational neurosis. The authorial persona is afflicted with basic anxiety as the implied author and with simple anxiety as the historical author and anxiety of authorship as a female writer. The conflict between the historical author's external dilemma and the implied author's internal dilemma leads to a profound inhibition against the very act of creating, and thus, the persona ends the poem at its peak of anxiety. Considering Young as a female writer who struggled against hardships in a literary world getting more commercial each day, the paper, using the terminology of Karen Horney and Julia Kristeva, argues that the anxious mood of the poet is represented through the discourse of the poetic persona, who not only reveals her anxiety and neurosis but also the problems of the poet herself.