The Evangeline Oak: of Lost Loves and Found Objects

Authors

  • John Adlam Psychoanalytical Group Psychotherapist and Organisational Consultant, London, UK

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1234/fa.v0i66.111

Keywords:

Evangeline, Longfellow, Romanticism, Cajun culture, mediatisation, pairing

Abstract

Down by the bayou in St Martinville, Louisiana, lies an oak tree which is supposed to mark the meeting place of Emmeline Labiche and Louis Arceneaux: the ‘Evangeline’ and ‘Gabriel’ whose legendary love, sundering and reunion is chronicled in Henry Longfellow’s epic poem ‘Evangeline’. In this paper, in response to the conceptualisation of the mediatisation of romantic love expounded by Storey and McDonald (2013), I use an associative structure to explore a range of 'found' cultural, literary, historical, group analytic and psychosocial associations to this legend and to give an account of my own personal response to it. I locate the idealised story of Evangeline and Gabriel and their unconsummated pairing at the heart of the Romantic movement and its links to both contemporary and late-modern colonial discourses and I place this in the context of a wider commentary on the alienation of emotional states of being in consumerist societies.

Author Biography

John Adlam, Psychoanalytical Group Psychotherapist and Organisational Consultant, London, UK

Consultant Adult Forensic Psychotherapist, River House, Bethlem Hospital and Principal Adult Psychotherapist, Avalon Ward, Springfield Hospital

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Published

2014-07-11

How to Cite

Adlam, J. (2014). The Evangeline Oak: of Lost Loves and Found Objects. Free Associations, (66), 45–66. https://doi.org/10.1234/fa.v0i66.111

Issue

No. 66 (2014)

Section

Articles

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