خواجه عبدالله انصاری

آن ارزی که می ورزی

دقیقی (شاعر بزرگ قرن چهارم هجری)

گویند صبر کن که تو را صبر بر دهد

آری دهد و لیک به عمرِ دگر دهد

من عمر خویش را به صبوری گذاشتم

عمری دگر بباید، تا صبر بر دهد

دقیقی ص ۱۶۲ گنج بازیافته

Analyzing the Concept of Focalization in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury - Seyyed Shahabed

Analyzing the Concept of Focalization in

William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

Seyyed Shahabeddin Sadati

 

Introduction

What are the definitions of narrative and narratology? Abrams in his A Glossary of Literary Terms defines narrative as follows: “A narrative is a story, whether in prose or verse, involving events, characters, and what the characters say and do.” And narratology: “a recent concern with narrative in general. It deals especially with the identification of structural elements and their diverse modes of combination, with recurrent narrative devices, and with the analysis of the kinds of discourse by which a narrative gets told” (Abrams 123). Thus, we can assert that narratology aims to analyze the structure of narratives.

In this essay with the help of Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, I would like to analyze the concept of focalization in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Rimmon-Kenan follows the theories of Genette, and she divides narrative in three basic aspects: story, text and narration. In the second and the third chapters of her book, she elaborates the notion of story. In the fourth, fifth and the sixth chapters she describes the narrative theories of text, and in the seventh and the eighth chapters she depicts the concept of narration.

At the beginning of chapter six she introduces the notion of “focalization”. “The story is presented in the text through the mediation of some ‘prism’, ‘perspective’, ‘angle of vision’, verbalized by the narrator though not necessarily his, following Genette (1927) I call this mediation focalization” (Rimmon-Kenan 71). Then she points to the differences between focalizer and narrator:

 

In principle, focalization and narration are distinct activities. In so–called ‘third-person centre of consciousness’, the centre of consciousness is the focalizer, while the user of the third person is the narrator. Focalization and narration are also separate in first-person retrospective narratives. (Rimmon-Kenan 73)

 

In other words, the person who tells the story is the narrator and the person who sees is the focalizer.

Regarding the position of focalization in the text, there are two types of focalization: “internal” and “external”. “External focalization is left to be close to the narrating agent, and its vehicle is therefore called ‘narrator-focalizer’. This type of focalization is predominant in Fielding’s Tom Jones” (Rimmon-Kenan 74). We have also external focalization in the first person narratives, either when the distance between the temporal and psychological narrator and character is minimal (as in Camus’s L’Etranger, 1957) or when the perception through which the story is rendered is that of the narrating self rather than that of the experiencing self. A good example is James Joyce’s Araby (1914). Then, Rimmon-Kenan defines internal focalization as follows:

 

As the term suggests, the locus of internal focalization is inside the represented events. This type generally takes the form of a ‘character-focalizer’, like Pip the child in many parts of Great Expectations. But internal focalization is sometimes no more than a textual stance, although even such an un-personified stance tends to be endowed by readers with the qualities of a character. (Rimmon Kenan 74)

 

One way for distinguishing external and internal focalization is to rewrite the given part in the first person. If it is possible, the part is internally focalized, if not, the focalization is external. Another characterization of focalization is ‘degree of persistence’. In this view focalization may remain ‘fixed’ throughout the narrative, as in James’s What Maisie Knew (1897), it can also become variable, as in White’s The Solid Mandana (1966), or it would be a multiple focalization, as in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1931).

Focalization has three facets. The first facet is the ‘perceptual’ which is determined by two main coordinates: space and time. The second facet is the ‘psychological’ which is concerned by focalizer’s mind and emotions, but perceptual facet talks with his sensory range. Psychological facet has two determining components: a) cognitive: know ledge, conjecture, belief and memory; b) emotive: it penetrates the emotions of the reader. The third facet is ‘ideological’ which is about the norms of the text, a general system of viewing the world conceptually. In the interrelations among the various facets, the perceptual, psychological and ideological facets may concur but they may also belong to different, even clashing, focalizers.

At the end of chapter six, Rimmon-Kenan talks about the concept of language and she defends the position of focalization in narratology:

 

To say that focalization is conveyed by various verbal indicators is not to cancel the distinction between focalization and narration with which I began. In itself, focalization is non-verbal; however, like everything else in the text, it is expressed by language. The overall language of a text is that of the narrator, but focalization can ‘color’ it in a way which makes it appear as a transposition of the perceptions of a separate agent. Thus both the presence of a focalizer other that the narrator and the shift from one focalizer to another maybe signaled by language. (Rimmon-Kenan 82)

 

Reading Strategy

I have chosen The Sound and the Fury for studying the notion of focalization in narratology. This novel contains four chapters by four different narrators; therefore, each narrator depicts the world and the characters and talks about different or similar things, but by different views. As I mentioned before in the “degrees of persistence” of the focalization, we have some shifts among several focalizers in The Sound an the Fury. During this study, I have analyzed the four chapters in this novel separately and then I have considered all the chapters as a whole. I have traced narrators and focalizers in these four chapters apart from each other and after that I was looking for a unique focalizer during the whole novel. The last important part of this reading is to consider all the facets of focalization in this novel. I will talk about these notions in detail in the next part of the essay.

 

Studying the Position of Focalization in The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury is a novel by William Faulkner, Published in 1929. A complex account of the history of the Compson family, the novel is divided into four sections, each under a different controlling perspective. The first section (April 7, 1928) is narrated by Benjy Compson the youngest member of the family, and an idiot. His section (a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury) blends present and past events into a single present–day narrative.

Like those of his brothers Quentin and Jason, Benjy’s main focus is on his relationship with his sister Caddy. Indeed, much of the grief, anguish, guilt and anger expressed in the first three sections are prompted by Caddy’s disappearance, which for Benjy amounts to the loss of the centre of his universe. The second section of the novel (June 2, 1910) is told by Quentin Compson, a freshman at Harvard. He is oppressed by his incestuous desire for Caddy and by the guilt this feeling evokes, and eventually he is driven to suicide. In the third section (April 6, 1928) Jason reveals his bitterness and anger at the opportunities he has lost because of the irresponsibility and selfishness which he feels predominate in his family. He is most enraged by the fact that Caddy, by leaving home, has evaded the family entrapment which he believes has ruined his life. The final section (April 8, 1928 – Easter Sunday) operates primarily as a commentary on the preceding three. In it the Compsons’ black servant, Dilsey, and her grandson, Luster, expose the degeneration of the white family and the distortion of its values. In 1946 Faulkner added an appendix which reviews the history of the Compson family from 1699 to 1945. It concludes with Faulkner’s assessment of the black people who have served the Compsons: “They endured”.

There are seven major characters in the novel which I would like to introduce them because it is necessary when we talk about the notion of focalizer:

Mr. Jason compson III: The head of the Cornpson family, Mr. Compson is a well-spoken but very cynical and detached man. He believes in a philosophy of determinism and fatalism. Despite his cynicism, however, Mr. Compson maintains notions of gentlemanliness and family honor, which Quentin inherits. Mr. Compson risks the family’s financial well-being in exchange for the potential prestige of Quentin’s Harvard education.  When he teaches his son with the concept of family honor, Mr. Compson is unconcerned with it in practice. He acts indifferent to Quentin about Caddy’s pregnancy, telling him to accept it as a natural womanly shortcoming. Mr. Compson finally dies of alcoholism.

Candace Compson: She is the second oldest of the Compson children and the only daughter. Caddy is perhaps the most important figure in the novel, as she represents the object of obsession for all three of her brothers. She steps in as a mother figure for Quentin and Benjy in place of the self-absorbed Mrs. Compson. Caddy does feel some degree of guilt about her adultery because she knows, it upsets Benjy so much. She rejects the Southern code that has defined her family’s history and that preoccupies Quentin’s mind. Unlike Quentin who is unable to escape the tragic world of the Compson household, Caddy manages to get away.

Benjy Compson: The youngest of the Compson family, a moaning, speechless idiot, Benjy is utterly dependent upon Caddy, his only real source of affection. Despite his utter inability to understand or interpret the world, however, Benjy does have an acute sensitivity to order and chaos, and he can immediately sense the presence of anything bad, wrong, or out of place. He is able to sense Quentin’s suicide thousands of miles away at Harvard, and senses Caddy’s adultery and loss of virginity. In light of this ability, Benjy is one of the only characters who truly take notice of the Compson family’s progressing decline.

Quentin Compson: The oldest of the Compson children, he is a very intelligent and sensitive young man, but is paralyzed with a very traditional Southern code of conduct and morality. This Southern code defines order and chaos within Quentin’s world, and causes him to idealize abstract concepts such as honor, virtue and feminine purity. His strict belief in this code causes Quentin profound despair when he learns of Caddy’s adultery. When Quentin finds that his sister and father have disregarded the code that gives order and meaning to his life, he eventually is driven to suicide.

Jason Compson IV: The second youngest of the Compson children, Jason remains distant from the other children. Like his brothers, Jason is fixated on Caddy, but his fixation is based on bitterness and a desire to get Caddy in trouble. Jason has no capacity to accept, enjoy or love and eventually he manipulates it to steal money from Miss Quentin behind Mrs. Compson’s back. Jason has no higher goals or aspirations and unlike Quentin, who is obsessed with the past, he thinks only about the present and the immediate future.

Miss Quentin: Caddy’s illegitimate daughter, she is the lone member of the newest generation family. Many parallels arise between Miss Quentin and her mother, Caddy, but the two differ in important ways. Miss Quentin repeats Caddy’s early sexual awakening and promiscuity, but, unlike Caddy, she does not feel guilty about her actions. Not surprisingly, we see that Miss Quentin is not nearly as loving or compassionate as her mother. She is also more worldly and headstrong than Caddy. Yet Miss Quentin’s eventual success in recovering her stolen money and escaping the family implies that her worldliness and lack of compunction, very modern values, indeed work to her benefit.

Dilsey: The Compson’s Negro cook, Dilsey is a pious, strong–willed, protective woman who serves as a stabilizing force for the Compson family. She is the only character detached enough from the Compson’s downfall to witness both the beginning and the end of the final chapter of the family history. Interestingly, Dilsey lives her life based on the same set of fundamental values, family, faith, personal honor, and so on, upon which the Compon’s original greatness was built. We sense that Dilsey is the new torchbearer of the Compson legacy, and represents the only hope for resurrecting the values of the old South in a pure and uncorrupted form.

 

Section One: April 7, 1928

In this section of the novel on the day before Easter, 1928, Luster, Dilsey’s grandson, takes Benjy out. It is Benjy’s thirty third’s birthday. Luster leads Benjy to a nearby golf course. When Benjy hears one of the golfers calling out to his caddie, he moans because the sound of the word reminds him of his sister, Caddy. From his moment, Benjy remembers some memories from 18 years ago, so this chapter includes not only the events that take place on April seventh. The narrator of this section is Benjy and he has no concept of time. He portrays all events in the present, regardless of when they actually occurred in his life.

The first focalizer in this part is Caddy when Benjy remembers her from the first page of the novel, the day when they were playing beside a river. Caddy is the internal focalizer, because she perhaps is the most important character in this novel, but she does not take part during the dialogues and we do not have her presence. After that Benjy remembers Uncle Maury and his love letters to Mrs. Patterson. These memories of Caddy make Benjy moans again. Other internal focalizers in this chapter are Mr. Compson, Quentin and his grandmother Damuddy whom Benjy remembers their death. During the next pages he again remembers Caddy, her wedding day in 1910 and he again moans and cries. We find Benjy as an objective narrator, as a camera which takes pictures from different events in different years. He is like a little child and can not focus on a special moment or character; therefore, we do not have a fixed focalizer or we can say there are shifts from one to another.

Sometimes Benjy returns back to the present day and he again remembers Caddy’s clothes’ smell and her adultery. In the present day he interrupts Miss Quentin’s love relationship with the man by the red tie. He then imagines those days when he was beside Caddy and remembers his name changing. Caddy’s lost of virginity and so on. In this part we can find the perceptual and psychological facets of focalizers because Benjy uses his eyesight, hearing, smelling and so on. This is perceptual and psychological because we are faced with his memories and emotions. As I mentioned above, we have multiple focalizers. At the end we can say the major facalizer is Benjy’s older sister, his mother–like figure Caddy.

 

Section Two: June 2, 1910

The narrator of the second chapter is Compson family’s oldest son, Quentin. During this part, like Benjy, sometimes he talks or narrates the story at the present time and most of the time he turns back to the past, he remembers the memories of his family’s past. Like Benjy, he has a big problem with the notion of time; he breaks his watch and does not like to know what time it is. In the beginning he remembers his conversation with Mr. Compson, his father, when they were talking about time and Southern codes. Then, he remembers the days when he was worried about Caddy’s adultery, and he wanted to pretend committing incest with Caddy for his beliefs in Southern code. In the present time we see him in Harvard University, a clock shop and his discussions with his classmates about virginity.

Quentin himself, as the narrator of the story at the present time, is the internal focalizer. But when he turns back to the past and his memories, we have multiple focalizers: his father and his sister Caddy. Another aspect is that we have the psychological and ideological facets of focalization. When Quentin turns back to his memories and emotions about the past, we witness the psychological facet, and when he thinks about Southern codes the ideological facet of focalizer becomes clear. Although Caddy is absent in the story she is again the major focalizer.

 

Section Three: April 6, 1928

Jason the second youngest of Compson family’s child is the narrator of this chapter of the novel. He begins this chapter as “once a bitch always a bitch, what I say” (Faulkner 198). From this beginning sentence we can find Jason’s view about life and family. Again like Benjy’s and Quentin’s narrations, Jason narrates the story in the present time and most of the time he thinks back on his family and his own personal history. When he is in the present day he struggles with Miss Quentin and accuses her of adultery, behaves very badly to the black servants and shows his separation from the family and society. When he turns back to the past he accuses Caddy for his misery.

During this chapter we can trace the symptoms of focalizatioin in Jason’s thought. In the present time he is the narrator and he himself is the focalizer because we are faced to his sadistic behavior toward the others. When thinks about the past we have two focalizers, the first one is he himself and the second one is Caddy. Therefore, we have multiple focalizers in this chapter, a shift from Jason to Caddy. In this chapter we have only psychological facet of focalization when Jason returns to his memories and emotions, however, he is the most emotionless character in this novel. Again like two previous chapters, we can conclude that the major focalizer in this chapter is Caddy, because Jason sees his life in relation with her sister and their past, and in this view Jason’s point of view is direct without any complexion in his narrative view.

 

Section Four: April 8, 1928

The narrator of this chapter is William Faulkner himself; therefore, we have an important difference between this chapter and the three previous chapters. The point of view in the previous chapters was third person limited omniscient because the narrators are the characters within the story. In the forth chapter, we have third person omniscient point of view. In this chapter, Miss Quentin steals Jason’s money from his bedroom and she escapes with her lover, the man with the red tie. We do not have flashbacks in this chapter. We are confronted with the events the day after Benjy’s narration. Jason goes for Miss Quentin and her lover for stopping them but the sheriff refuses to help without more substantial evidence of Miss Quentin’s wrong doing. At the end of the chapter, we see Dilsey who calms Benjy and wants to save the family.

We may expect Caddy to narrate the last section, however, Faulkner narrates this section and he focuses on black people in Compson’s family especially Dilsey. Dilsey is the internal focalizer in this chapter when the story goes forward from her view. We see the ideological and psychological facets of focalization when we are confronted with Dilsey and Luster’s kindness toward the other family members. Sometimes Jason is the focalizer because the story is about his money, so again we have a shift in focalization, multiple focalizers. And the last focalizer is Benjy, the novel closes where it started, we return to the world of order and chaos that exist in Benjy’s mind.

 

Conclusion

The Sound and the Fury is one of the greatest novels in twentieth century. In this essay, I tried to study this book with the view of the notions of narrator and focalizer. I have traced focalization in these four chapters of the novel to find: who is the narrator? Who is the focalizer? And what are the focalization’s facets? First, I wanted to show who is the narrator of the chapter and what are his characteristics. I have found that we have four different points of view by four different narrators: Benjy, Quentin, Jason and Faulkner himself. Second, I have tried to follow focalizer’s symptoms in these chapters. I have found that we have different or multiple focalizers during the whole novel. By narrating the story from changing the time, we have a shift between focalizers, from one to another. I understood that we have a fixed or major focalizer during these four chapters who is Caddy. Third, I have talked about the psychological, perceptual and ideological facets of focalization. I have found all these facets during the whole novel. By utilizing the notion of focalization which is one of the most important concepts in narratology, we can understand and analyze the text of the novels better. Another benefit is reading the characters, narrators and the concept of time more carefully.

 

Works Cited:

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1993.

Beckoff, Samuel. The Sound and the Fury Notes. Simon and Schuster, 1973.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. Random House, 1946.

Rimmon–Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. Routledge, 1994.

www.sparknotes.com

 

 

Freudian Psychoanalysis on Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover - Seyyed Shahabeddin Sadati

Freudian Psychoanalysis on Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover

Seyyed Shahabeddin Sadati

Introduction:

The theories of Sigmund Freud and their practice on literary texts provide the foundation for psychoanalytic criticism. While working with his patients diagnosed as hysterics, Freud theorized that the root of their problems was psychological, not physical. These patients, he believed, had suppressed incestuous desires with which they had unconsciously refused to deal.

Freud was the first to suggest that the storehouse for these desires was the unconscious, his name for that part of the psyche or mind that receives and stores our hidden desires, ambitions, fears, passions, and irrational thoughts. Unaware of the presence of the unconscious, we operate consciously, Freud asserted, believing that our reasoning and analytical skills are solely responsible for our behavior. But it is the unconscious, Freud believed, that evidences itself through slips of tongue, dreams, art, and irrational behavior that motivates most of our actions.

Freud later revised this theory, believing that no thought was either totally conscious or totally unconscious, and he spoke rather of modes of consciousness or unconsciousness. The irrational, unknown, and unconscious part of the psyche Freud calls the id, and the rational, logical, waking part the ego. A third part, the superego, acts like an internal censor, causing us to make moral judgments in the light of social pressures. The ego’s job is to mediate between the instinctual (especially sexual) desires of the id and the demands of social pressure issued by the superego. What the ego (consciousness) finds unacceptable it suppresses and deposits in the unconscious. And what it has most frequently repressed in all of us is the sexual desires of our early childhood (Guerin 124 – 127).

According to Freud, in our early childhood all of us go through three overlapping phases: the oral, anal, and phallic stages. As infants, we experience the oral phase: by sucking our mother’s breast to be fed, our sexuality (or libido) is activated. Our mouths become an erotogenic zone that will later cause us to enjoy sucking our tongues, and still later kissing. In the second phase, or anal stage, the anus becomes the object of pleasure when the child learns the delights of defecation. During this stage the anus becomes an erotogenic zone, for the child becomes sadistic, expelling and destroying through defecation. By withholding feces, the child also learns that he or she can control or manipulate others. In the last phase, the phallic stage, the child’s sexual desires or libido is directed toward the genitals (Guerin 129).

At this point in our development, Freud posited, the pleasure principle basically controls the child. Being self-centered, sadistic, and assertive, the child cares for nothing but his or her own pleasure and recognizes neither male nor female. If the child, however, is to grow up as a ‘normal’ adult, he or she must develop a sense of sexuality, a sense of his maleness of her femaleness. This awareness, Freud asserted, is expressed through the Oedipus complex (Hall 157). “During the late infantile stage (somewhere between the ages of 3 and 6), both the male and female child wish to possess their mother. Unconsciously, the male child desires to engage in sexual union with his mother, while the female child, Freud asserts, develops homosexual desires toward her mother. But each child now recognizes a rival for his or her mother’s affection: the father” (Bressler 90).

If the child’s sexual development is to proceed normally, Freud maintained, each must pass through the castration complex. From observing themselves, their mothers, and perhaps their sisters, little boys know they have a penis like their fathers while their mothers and sisters do not. What the male child from continuing to have incestuous desires for his mother is fear of castration by his father. On the other hand, the little girl unconsciously realizes that she is already castrated as is her mother. Since she knows her father possesses that which she desires, a penis, she turns her desires to him and away from her mother. After the seduction of her father fails, she turns back toward the mother and identifies with her. Her transition into womanhood complete, the girl realizes that one day she, too, like her mother, will possess a man. Through her relationship with a man, her unfulfilled desire for a penis (penis envy) will be reduced and her sense of lacking can be somewhat appeased (Bressler 90 – 91).

Since the consciousness and the unconsciousness are part of the same psyche, the unconscious with its hidden desires and repressed wishes continues to affect the conscious in the form of inferiority feelings, guilt, irrational thoughts and feelings, and dreams and nightmares. In dreams, Freud asserted, the unconscious expresses its suppressed wishes and desires. Since wishes may be too hard for the unconscious psyche to handle without producing feelings of self-hatred or range, the unconscious will present our concealed wishes through symbols, softening our desires. “The unconscious can for instance hide repressed desire behind an image that would seem to be harmless; a trick that Freud called displacement or it can project a whole cluster of desires onto an image in a maneuver that Freud called condensation: a dream figure can for instance combine characteristics of a number of people we know. The language that we use may always have hidden meanings of which we ourselves have no conscious awareness. If we repress our hatred for a person who usually wears red, we may accidentally say dead instead of red in a conversation, or we may dream that a red car is flattened in a traffic accident” (Bertens 159).

When certain repressed feelings or ideas can not be adequately released through dreams, jokes, or other mechanisms such as slips of tongue, the ego must act block any outward response.  In so doing, the ego and id become involved in an internal battle that Freud called neurosis. From a fear of heights to a pounding headache, neurosis shows itself in many physical and psychological abnormalities. According to Freud, it is the job of the psychoanalyst to identify those unresolved conflicts that give rise to a patient’s neurosis and through psychoanalytic therapy, which includes dream analysis, return the patient to a state of well-being.

Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen (7 June 1899 to 22 February 1972) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer. Bowen is well-known for her works, being awarded Doctorates in literature by Trinity College, Dublin (1949) and the University of Oxford (1959). She was also awarded of the CBE (Osby 107).

Bowen was born in Dublin and later brought to Bowen’s Court in Country Cork where she spent her summers. When her father became mentally ill in 1907, she and her mother moved to England, eventually settling in Hythe. After her mother died in 1912, Bowen was brought up by her aunts (Osby 106).

She was educated at Downe House. After some time at art school in London she decided that her talent lay in writing. She mixed with the Bloomsbury Group, becoming good friends with Rose Macaulay, who helped her find a publisher for her first book, Encounters (1923). She realized that her life time coincided with the death of one era and the birth pangs of another. At such a border crossing sensibility could not move forward unattended. With its cult of privacy, Bloomsbury tended to limit its communication to members of its own circle.  For Elizabeth Bowen, those who besought the muses prayed harder for skill in reaching readers than for fame as devisers of ciphers. While still an apprentice monitoring the London scene, she attended a reading by another of the gurus of Modernism, Ezra Pound. She found him “hypnotically unintelligible.” His cryptograms excluded too much. In 1923 she married Alan Cameron, an educational administrator who subsequently worked for the BBC.

Bowen inherited Bowen’s Court in 1930, but remained based in England, making frequent visits to Ireland. During World War II she worked for the British Ministry of Information, reporting on Irish opinion, particularly on the issue of Irish neutrality. Her husband retired in 1952 and they settled in Bowen’s Court, when Alan Cameron died a few months later. For years Bowen struggled to keep the house going, lecturing in the United States to earn money. In 1959 the house was sold and demolished. After spending some years without a permanent home, Bowen settled in Hythe and died of cancer in 1972, aged 73. She is buried with her husband in Farahy church yard, close to the gates of Bowen’s Court.

Her style of writing highly wrought and owes much to Henry James. She was also influenced by Marcel Proust and by the techniques of film. Place has a central role in her work. She resisted approaches to storytelling that smelled of dogma. Homiletics grafted on fiction, for her, constituted a major heresy. Creative work was as essential as food, yet it remained irrevocably of this world.

 

Reading Strategy:

During the writing of this essay with the help of my sources, I tried to study Elizabeth Bowen’s short story “The Demon Lover”, and to find hidden points by applying Freudian psychoanalysis approach on the text. I followed the text carefully word by word to find various symbols which are directly or indirectly related to psyche of the characters. These symbols which consciously or unconsciously come from inner world, most of the time, they are connected to the childhood of characters or the author’s. To fulfill this job correctly, I followed images, objects, and symbols which are related to the inner world, they are hidden and the researcher has tried to reveal them. It ought to be underlined that, the essay you are reading is aiming to analyze “The Demon Lover” on a more psychoanalytical basis.

During the whole steps, I followed these questions: Is “The Demon Lover” a neurotic story? What are the images or symbols which are related to the inside world? What is the role of memories in this story? What are the impacts of war on characters’ mind? And at last, how to find Freud’s theories in “The Demon Lover”? These are the questions which I tried to answer them in the next part of my essay.

 

Freudian Approach on “The Demon Lover”

“The Demon Lover” was referred in “The New Yorker” magazine after its publication as a completely explanation of what war did to the mind and spirit of the English people.  The name and somehow the plot of “The Demon Lover” is inspired from an old English ballad whose poet is anonymous:

 

“O where have you been, my long love,

This long seven years and mair?”

“O I’m come to seek my former vows

Ye granted me before.”

 

“O hold your tongue of your former vows,

For they will breed sad strife;

O hold your tongue of your former vows,

For I am become a wife.”

 

He turned him right and round about,

And the tear blinded his ee:

“I wad never hae trodden on Irish ground,

If it had not been for thee.”

 

“I might hae had a king’s daughter,

Far, far beyond the sea;

I might have had a king’s daughter,

Had it not been for love o thee.”

 

“If ye might have had a king’s daughter,

Yer sel ye had to blame;

Ye might have had taken the king’s daughter,

For ye kend that I was nane.”

 

“If I was to leave my husband dear,

And my two babes also,

O what have you to take me to,

If with you I should go?”

 

“I hae seven ships upon the sea—

The eighth brought me to land—

With four-and-twenty bold mariners,

And music on every hand.”

 

She has taken up her two little babes,

Kissed them baith cheek and chin:

“O fair ye weel, my ain two babes,

For I’ll never see you again.

 

She set foot upon the ship,

No mariners could she behold;

But the sails were o the taffetie,

And the masts o the beaten gold.

 

She had not sailed a league,

A league but barely three,

When dismal grew his countenance,

And drumlie grew his ee.

 

They had not sailed a league, a league,

A league but barely three,

Until she espied his cloven foot,

And she wept right bitterlie.

 

“O hold your tongue of your weeping”, says he,

“Of your weeping now let me be;

I will shew you how the lilies grow

On the banks of Italy.”

 

“O what hills are you, you pleasant hills,

That the sun shines sweetly on”?

“O you are the hills of heaven”, he said,

“Where you will never win.”

 

“O whaten a mountain is you”, she said,

“All so dreary wi frost and snow”?

“O you is the mountain of hell”, he cried,

“Whre you and I will go.”

 

He strack the tap-mast wi his hand,

The fore-mast wi his knee,

And he brake that gallant ship in twain,

And sank her in the sea.

 

Since this story was written after the Blitz, the catastrophic aerial bombardment which took place over London between the years of 1940 and 1941; the main character of this short story, Mrs. Drovers is a person who has this post-trauma which she get confronted after all what had happened. Because of her psychological instability, Mrs. Drovers, confuses World War II with World War I. Returning home to collect some personal belongings, she remembers her long-dead fiancé to the point where one does not know if this is a gothic story that has some supernatural happenings or simply a story of one character’s neurotic mental state.

Far from being a supernatural story, the ghostly threat, rather than having any external reality, is a product of the disturbed mental state of the protagonist, Mrs. Kathleen Drover. Her guilt over her fiancé’s disappearance and presumed death in the First World War, buried by the conventional marriage, has been reawakened by another war, and she hallucinates his vengeful return.

Indeed, Freudian approach is essential to analyze this story properly not alone being appealing because Mrs. Drovers in the story, is not only having some homecoming and witnessing some abnormal activity aftermath; but she is also channeling with her psyche in an abandoned house and seeing the cracks in her soul. According to Freud, these cracks would refer to some sexual problems which are related to past or even childhood. These cracks would relate to womb or female sexual organ, “following Freud’s example in his interpretations of dreams, the psychoanalytic critic tends to see all concave images (ponds, flowers, cups or vases, caves, and hollows) as female or womb symbols, and all images whose length exceeds their diameters (towers, mountain peaks, snakes, knives, lances, and swords) as male or phallic symbols” (Guerin 128).

“The Demon Lover” starts on a humid August day. It is due to rain; there is a certain stress in the air and as the main character enters the street covered with clouds, one can sense that she is having this very same tension, the suppression the weather has. Thus, Mrs. Drovers, a “prosaic” woman goes back to her London house to look for several things, but what “things”? These things are unknown to the reader, as it is indeed unknown to Mrs. Drovers herself and this is why she has a suppressed feeling around, a sense of waiting, the tension before the rain. She is indeed going there to confront with the house that she had left since war has started; in some other sense she is going to face herself in the image of the house to understand what kind of damage has done while experiencing the measure of this damage deep inside. This personification theme linked between Mrs. Drovers and the house, is one of the most important elements of the story.

She tries to open the door for this confrontation but the key lock is quite stiff. She has to force it and then “dead air” of this unvisited, her unvisited portion of memories welcomes her just before setting her feet. Hear her unconscious becomes aware of the old memories. This door is indeed a portal of her very own past; she forces it since she hasn’t been thinking of her past but only trying to forget it because all bad memories, all suppressed traumas are there behind this door so are the several things which she returned to pick up. “Dead air”, coming out to greet her, shows that these memories are negative. These are especially, about the two world wars she witnessed and this house has suffered from the aerial bombardment that took over London during the war; situated on an abandoned street with its ruined neighbor houses. Mrs. Drover’s soul is one of the victims who suffered, like this empty, broken, ruined houses. Inside this personification theme follows: The “bruise” on the wall is indeed the bruise in Mrs. Drover’s psyche. The scratches on parquet which the legs of the piano left while they were moving symbolizes that the joy is taken from the her harshly; since piano as an instrument is seen and used as an entertainment object in that era mostly. The windows of the house have blocked, so there is no way to have some fresh air; thus a fresh start is impossible, there is no way to let go of the past and bad memories. She sees that marble mantelpiece has turned to yellow, losing its beautiful whiteness and brightness; it is matte now. Once it used to be white and its function warm up the house. Mantelpiece is not burning, only full of ashes, it is useless now. It is indeed like the piano taken away. It symbolizes joy, happiness, but it also symbolizes peace warmth and harmony that is lost; the tranquility which is erased from Mrs. Drover’s psyche.

Now she is more perplexed than she knew by every thing she saw by these traces of her former life. She goes to upstairs, leaving her parcels down in order to look for the things that are in the bedroom chest. Her proceeding to the upstairs shows that she is jumping one step further for exploring her suppressed memories and bedroom chest again links with the feeling of suppression since it is a way to hide and protect personal belongings mostly. The things inside it are her emotional luggage that is left in the house which represents her soul. These things are newly remembered, forgotten before since she comes to look for them though the house is abandoned. Her search for abandoned identity and memories buried down there are these things she needs.

“There were some cracks in the structure, left by the last bombing, on which she was anxious to keep an eye. Not that one could do anything-,” (Bowen 347). The cracks she is worried to see, are the cracks that the war created, are the ones, which disintegrated her soul. They are the results of her pain and she is utterly sure that nothing can be done about this situation. She gives away herself to the hands of insanity while progressing one level up in her trauma. Thus, a refracted light suddenly shines on a letter that is addressed to her in the hall. This is one of the things which she came back for. This refracted spotlight is her own torch she is projecting inside her. She takes the letter while trying to find a logical meaning for its presence in the hall and goes on her journey by following the stairs. She is indeed more like diving down to her unconsciousness; but this progress is symbolized by going up, which is rather showing Mrs. Drovers is bringing out her suppressed feelings, the trauma on the surface with the help of this letter. This letter is the final strike, left there to show the peak point of her delirium because of all this damage that the war has done on the fragile walls of her soul.

In the bedroom, she tries to let some light in while seeing that rain is coming. The tension in air reaches to a climax as the tension which is caused by the suppressed feelings of the main character reaches this very same point. Now that that cracks are so deep that Mrs. Drover loses all her control when she reads this letter, thinking that this a letter which written by her ex-lover who died in the previous war. But the letter is signed with the very same initial, with the letter “K” of her name which is “Kathleen”. One possibility is that “K” really is her long lost lover, the dashing soldier who vanished without a trace in the First World War. He has simply — and perversely — come to reclaim his betrothed after a twenty-five-year absence, during which he watched and waited, stalked and followed. Indeed this letter written by Mrs. Dover herself. It is her way of making something out of her guilt and her memories since she suppresses them all the time. Mrs. Drover, who has confronted with her soul in the image of her house, links and somehow mistakes her old memories about the previous war with this present one.

On the other hand world war or the dead soldier would be the symbol of id, without any limitation in pleasure and sexuality. We see this idea in the violent scene which the soldier rapes Kathleen. They were not married, and with no restriction they only think about their pleasure, (their first love, the irresistible incarnation of youthful passion and scandalous behavior). When the soldier goes to war she waits for him, but after a short period of time they bring the news for Kathleen that the soldier is dead. She became worried, and she could not have a nice relationship with any man. The society especially her family at the superego role encourage her to think of another man. Then she tries to control herself, she gets marry reluctantly with Mr. Drover, and brings up her three children, and thus she would be the representation of ego. But inside her psyche she loses the notion of time and her mental instability since the things she discovered inside are too much for her. She is disintegrated and going insane. As the rain falls; we see this pattern of insanity, this way of letting go which is mentioned above. By surrendering to hysteria the release of the tension comes at the end.

The hollowness of the house this evening canceled years on years of voices, habits and steps, putting her back into the more dominant awareness of war, and so her soldier appears — on one level perhaps an hallucination but on another a symbol of war that will not go away. This symbolism in the sentences is the major theme that keeps the story going. After seeing herself mirrored in the image of her house, Mrs. Drover freaks out so much about what she sees. Here in the story, Mrs. Drover looks back into her own past through the house image but still she can not find a logical explanation she wants and since she is the prosaic type she gets trapped with insanity seeing the outcome which is so illogically horrid.

This story is not only a homecoming for meeting some supernatural event only but it is a melodrama of what war did one’s soul: War, not a vengeful lover, is the demon that overwhelms this rueful woman. Elizabeth Bowen says in her book Bowen’s Court (1964) this: “War is not an accident: it is an outcome. One can not look back too far to ask, of what?” (411). One thing is absolutely clear at the end of the “The Demon Lover”: Kathleen Drover is never reconciled with her lost past. And the final image of Mrs. Drover trapped in the taxi speeding mercilessly into the hinterland of deserted streets perfectly portrays the feelings of millions of people who witnessed wasteland of rubble and death in Europe. War is the harsh demon lover which ruined the whole continent, and the all souls that hide in houses have their own deep cracks all over.

 

Conclusion:

“Of all the critical approaches to literature, Freudian psychoanalysis is perhaps the most controversial, the most abused, and — for most readers — the least appreciated.  But the psychoanalytical interpretation can afford many profound clues toward solving a work’s thematic and symbolic mysteries, it is excellent tool for reading beneath the lines” (Guerin 120 – 121). During the whole steps of studying Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover”, I have found that the incidents are taken place in the mind of the main character, Mrs. Drover. The two World Wars had very bad influences on her psyche. When she visits her empty house in London, and her unconscious became aware of the past negative memories. Mrs. Drover disarrayed house, which Bowen describes in characteristic detail, reflects her internal collapse. All the things that she sees in that house are the symbols in her psyche. For example, the cracks she sees on the wall are the real cracks in her mind.  The letter “K” she recognizes one a letter on the table, in fact is she herself, Kathleen Drover. If Bowen were writing only about the women haunted by the memories of lovers lost in the First World War, however, she is hardly likely to portray Mrs. Drover’s fiancé in such harsh, negative terms. This story would be a pure Freudian story under the influence of Henry James’s literary works. By watching the cracks on the wall, Mrs. Drover remembers the violent moments of her sexual encounters with the vanished soldier. That soldier would be the incarnation of devil or the pure id in Freud’s theories. Her family who encourages her to get marry after the soldier’s death news would be the Freud’s superego. She has had an unsatisfactory marriage, marked by years of accumulated emptiness. Her London house is an objective correlative of Mrs. Kathleen Drover’s psychological state. Finally, I would like to conclude that the real demon lover or the real id in Freud’s theories is War. The two World Wars which destroyed the people’s mind and life, especially Europeans, are the real demon. The First World War and the Second World War made Mrs. Kathleen Drover insane who cannot control herself. In fact she is like millions in the world during the wars.

 

Works Cited

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of literary terms. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1993.

Bertens, Hans. Literary Theory, the Basics. London: Routledge, 2001.

Bowen, Elizabeth. Bowen’s Court. London: Collins, 1964.

Bowen, Elizabeth. The Demon Lover. Oxford Book of Short Stories. Ed. V. S. Prichett. Oxford” OUP, 1981. 341-346.

Cuddon, A. J. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory. London: Penguin Books, 1999.

Green, Keith. Critical Theory and Practice: A Course Book. London: Routledge, 1996.

Guerin L. Wilfred. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Harper and Row, 1978.

Hall, Vernon. A Short History of Literary Criticism. London: The Merlin Press Ltd., 1964.

Osby, Ian. The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English. London: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 

خاطرات گذشته

سال 1385 در کلاس نقد خواننده – محور و موضوعات پدیدارشناسی بود که برای اولین بار از استاد عزیزم آقای دکتر نجومیان آموختم که بر خلاف تصور، خاطره امری ثابت در ذهن نیست. بلکه خاطره ها مرتب تغییر می کنند و در زمانهای مختلف بازسازی می شوند و معنایی متفاوت از قبل پیدا می کنند. چقدر برایم عجیب و در عین حال زیبا بود که مسائلی که در گذشته اتفاق افتاده اند و تمام شده اند قابل تغییر هستند. حتی گذشته ای که به نظر می رسد تمام شده و دیگر قابل دسترسی نیست در بازنگری خاطرات تغییر می کنند. حال که دوستان قدیمی خود را پس از سالها پیدا می کنم این موضوع را بیشتر حس می کنم، و چقدر زیباست خاطراتی که تولید و بازتولید می شوند و مرتب معنا و مفهومی تازه پیدا می کنند.

امام علی (ع)

هر فریب خورده ای را نمی توان سرزنش کرد

امام علی (ع)

امام علی (ع)

ناتوان ترین مردم کسی است که در دوست یابی ناتوان است،

و از او ناتوان تر آنکه دوستان خود را از دست بدهد

امام علی (ع)

امام علی (ع)

اگر بر دشمنت دست یافتی،

بخشیدن او را شکرانه پیروزی قرار ده

امام علی (ع)

امام علی (ع)

انسان از خود راضی، دشمنان او فراوانند

امام علی (ع)

امام علی (ع)

در فتنه ها، چونان شتر دو ساله باش،

نه پشتی دارد که سواری دهد،

و نه پستانی تا او را بدوشند.

امام علی (ع)