Paper Summary:

The paper discusses Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan" and Charlotte Bronte's novel "Jane Eyre" and highlights how ideas of the masculine and feminine are used to help create meaning. This paper describes these two works and their use of the feminine archetype. In "Jane Eyre," ideas of masculinity and femininity are used to show that individuals are made up of both feminine and masculine traits. A similar use of the feminine archetype is seen in "Kubla Khan" where the opposites of the feminine and masculine archetype are used to represent good and evil.

From the Paper:

"The poem "Kubla Khan" is about a vision of heaven on earth. The poet imagines this heaven on earth, but on creating it on earth it is seen that it can never be a true paradise. The problem is that there are forces of evil on earth that alter the paradise and make it less than all good. In this way, the paradise can only ever be a dream and can never be realized. While the dream is the subject of the poem, it is also saying a lot about the nature of reality and life on earth. It is showing that there exists both good and evil and that these must remain in balance. The feminine archetype is used as a way of representing the two opposites that have to be in balance, where the feminine archetype must be balanced with the masculine archetype. In the vision of the poem, this balance is not present and the world presented is strongly female. At the same time, the female archetype represents everything that is good. However, in reality the world is strongly masculine, which is why heaven cannot exist on earth."

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