Transformation of Rage. Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone

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СКАЧАТЬ by the wayside, and Freud’s theorizing on female psychology has been recognized as a reflection of his cultural bias.

      Significant developments have also taken place in psychoanalytic literary theory. An extraordinary variety and synthesis of competing approaches have emerged, including post-Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian, Horneyan, feminist, deconstructive, psycholinguistic, and reader response. Interest in psychoanalytic literary criticism is at an all-time high, not just in the handful of journals devoted to psychological criticism, but in dozens of mainstream journals that have traditionally avoided psychological approaches to literature. Scholars are working on identity theory, narcissism, gender theory, mourning and loss, and creativity. Additionally, they are investigating new areas, such as composition theory and pedagogy, and exploring the roles of resistance, transference, and countertransference in the classroom.

      "In the end we depend / On the creatures we made," Freud observed at the close of his life (Letters, 425), quoting from Goethe’s Faust; and in the end psychoanalytic literary criticism depends on the scholars who continue to shape it. All serious scholarship is an act of love and devotion, and for many of the authors in this series, including myself, psychoanalytic literary criticism has become a consuming passion, in some cases a lifelong one. Like other passions, there is an element of idealization here. For despite our criticisms of Freud, we stand in awe of his achievements; and even as we recognize the limitations of any single approach to literature, we find that psychoanalysis has profoundly illuminated the human condition and inspired countless artists. In the words of the fictional "Freud" in D. M. Thomas’s extraordinary novel The White Hotel(1981), "Long may poetry and psychoanalysis continue to highlight, from their different perspectives, the human face in all its nobility and sorrow" (143n.).

      JEFFREY BERMAN

      Professor of English State University of New York at Albany

Acknowledgments

      An earlier version of "The Pattern of the Myth of Narcissus in Daniel Deronda” appeared in University of Hartford Studies in Literature 19 (1987): 45-60.

      An earlier version of "Narcissistic Rage in The Mill on the Floss” appeared in Literature and Psychology 36 (1990): 90-109.

      Earlier versions of "Self-Disorder and Aggression in Adam Bede” and "Loss, Anxiety, and Cure: Mourning and Creativity in Silas Marner” appeared in Mosaic 22 (1989): 59-70 and 25 (1992): 35–47 respectively.

      I would like to thank the editors, Charles L. Ross, formerly of Hartford Studies, Morton Kaplan of Literature and Psychology, and Evelyn J. Hinz of Mosaic, for their help during the publication process.

      I also want to thank Arthur Collins for guiding my independent study of George Eliot and Jeffrey Berman for guiding my independent study of literature and psychoanalysis during my doctoral student days at SUNY at Albany nearly a decade ago.

      Finally, I want to thank Douglas Johnstone and Jeffrey Berman for so willingly reading my manuscript prior to publication. I made good use of their suggestions during my final revisions. I am also grateful to the editorial staff at New York University Press for their assistance during the book publication process.

Introduction

      George Eliot’s fiction synthesizes the intellectual currents of the nineteenth century. As a lifelong zealous reader and self-directed student, Eliot gained not only a rich background in literature and history, religion and philosophy, art, music, and languages (German, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, and Latin), but throughout her life she kept up with the latest developments in the sciences, including the emerging social sciences of psychology and sociology. Her partner, George Henry Lewes, was also famous in his own right for his substantial writings on a wide variety of subjects, including literature, philosophy, biology, and psychology. Among the eminent names in their shared milieu were Herbert Spencer, the philosopher perhaps best remembered for his "Social Darwinism," Alexander Bain, the British Associationist psychologist, and Charles Darwin, the naturalist whose theories Lewes studied closely and with whom he corresponded on occasion. Much of the literary criticism on George Eliot has illuminated the influences of such contemporaries on her art. Her fiction writing, however, is far more than a synthesis of the thinking of other intellectuals. Her approach to fiction and her insights were her own, and although she "epitomizes" her century, as Basil Willey expresses it (Century 260), her fiction was also unique in its time.

      Literary criticism in the twentieth century initially established George Eliot’s position as a great writer by virtue of the "universality" and "profoundly moral character" of her themes, as Alan D. Perlis explains it (xv). Critics have long noted Eliot’s concern with the theme of growth in her central characters from egoism and/or self-delusion to self-knowledge and a capacity for empathy. Critics of the fifties and sixties, influenced by the New Critical emphasis on textual analysis, helped readers appreciate the formal qualities of Eliot’s art: the complex designs of her novels, the unifying imagery and symbolism, the rich sense of time and place that her writing evokes, and the psychological insight that distinguishes her characterizations from the novelists that preceded her. In the seventies and eighties, an explosion of interest in Eliot is reflected in the quantity, excellence, and variety of the criticism, which has added deconstructionist, feminist, and psychoanalytic dimensions to readers' understanding of her work. In addition, as Perlis notes, criticism in those decades has demonstrated that "the social context of Eliot’s work is so rich and complicated that historical, sociological, philosophical, and, perhaps most important, scientific events and discoveries, are intricately bound in the lives of Eliot’s characters" (xiv). Despite the general acceptance of Eliot’s position as one of the great English novelists, however, many critics have also seen flaws in her work which they often express in terms of her self-involvement with her idealized characters and/or the closely related problem of the forced endings of many of her novels. It was through my study of psychoanalysis, in conjunction with my work on George Eliot, that I began to see the connection between the artistic flaws in the novels and the author’s personal conflicts.

      I also began to see the connection between the author’s personal conflicts and her denial of aggression in her idealized characters–a subject that has increasingly attracted the attention of critics. U. C. Knoepflmacher suggests in his bibliographic essay that the subject of aggression in Eliot’s fiction is one "worth considering more fully" by "practitioners of the psychoanalytical approach" (Victorian 257). In recent years, literary critics such as Carol Christ, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, William Myers, and Dorothea Barrett have noted Eliot’s apparent concern over the murderous potential of anger, a concern reflected, as Gilbert and Gubar observe, in her tendency to create idealized heroines who "repress anger" and "submit to renunciation" (490). My study, the first book-length psychoanalytic treatment of the subject of aggression in George Eliot’s novels, thus constitutes an attempt to respond to the need articulated by Knoepflmacher and other modern critics.

      During the course of my psychoanalytic study of George Eliot’s fiction, I moved from my initial interest in the subject of narcissism, as reflected in my first published essay on Daniel Deronda(1987), to a more particular focus on aggression: the ways in which it is portrayed in the characters, the ways in which it is denied by the author, and the ways in which it affects the author’s creative process. While I began by applying the theories of two contemporary psychoanalysts, Otto F. Kernberg and Heinz Kohut, to my study of the novels, I discovered after the publication of my essays on Adam Bede(1989) and The Mill on the Floss(1990), that I needed to return to the writings of Sigmund Freud in my attempt to understand the character Silas Marner’s obsessive-compulsive behavior and its relationship to rage. At the same time, I also read the works of contemporary psychologists–behaviorists, cognitive psychologists, and psycho-pharmacologists–who offer differing perspectives on the obsessive-compulsive disorder. СКАЧАТЬ