Tricksters to Delegate the Shadow: Analysing Goethe’s Erlkönig and Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci through a Jungian Framework

Abstract

This article examines Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Der Erlkönig (1782) and John Keats's ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819) within the framework of Jungian psychoanalysis, focusing particularly on the poetic representation of the shadow and trickster archetypes. The study argues that both works vividly dramatise the self's unsuccessful encounter with the repressed side of the psyche. Drawing on Jung's concepts of the collective unconscious, individuation, and archetypal projection, the poems' captivating ancient figures—the deadly Elven King and the merciless fairy woman—are not merely others but also unconscious agents who disrupt the ego and compel a radical transformation. By employing a close reading of the text both poems’ imagery, narrative structure, and mood are analysed. Thus, the protagonists’ involvement with a trickster, a figure that uses a deceptive allure in order to distort perception and yield a fatal seduction, is meticulously observed. This process leads to both protagonists’ psychic collapse, a complete disintegration of their consciousness. This psychological breakdown is a visual manifestation of the failure that results from succumbing to a hedonistic impulse in the face of a sense of duty. In other words, Goethe's image of a child dying in his father's arms and Keats's desolate, wandering knight morph into expressionist images of personas who lose their sense of duty and responsibility during the process of confronting a shadow realm adorned with the allure of pleasures. The findings demonstrate how the poets’ romantic preoccupation with the uncanny externalised the experience of confronting the shadow through poetic language, suggesting that the literary text offers a space that illuminates the individual and cultural unconscious.