Read Ebook: The Erotic Motive in Literature by Mordell Albert

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Freud discovered that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious, in that they portrayed our most daring and immoral wishes as actually fulfilled. It is not necessary that we actually have those wishes in our waking life; it is sufficient if they merely intruded themselves upon us against our wills sometime in the past. The dream will express our inmost thoughts. It will use symbolical language to let us still remain in the dark about our painful desires; but the psychoanalyst can learn what these are. As a result, when we have revealed to us what unconscious emotions are at the bottom of our nervous disturbances, we may be eased of them.

Many writers on dreams, in the past, understood that they referred to events of our daily life, but the exact relation was not seen. The ancients were especially interested in the phenomena of dreams. Many ancient histories and fairy tales abound in narrations and interpretations of dreams.

Modern literary men also have paid a great deal of attention to them. There are essays on dreams by Locke, Hobbes, Thomas Browne, Addison, Leigh Hunt, Dickens, Emerson and Lafcadio Hearn.

Freud's work may almost be called a commentary on this extraordinary passage of one of England's greatest critics.

Let us examine a few dreams, actual and artificial, in literature, and we will note that they show method in their madness, that they are ways of expressing the person's unconscious desires.

Stevenson, in his essay, relates a dream wherein unwittingly he lays bare much about some past experience in his life. He found it too immoral he says to make a tale of it. But he did immoral things in his dream; these were related to certain wishes in his waking hours. Those who are familiar with an episode in Stevenson's life, that relating to his marriage, and with Freud's theories, will find no difficulty in interpreting the dream and seeing how the dream and the events in his life which gave rise to it, tally with one another, when the Freudian method is applied. In fact the truth of Freud's views could be established alone by the interpretation applied to this dream.

Two men were in the way of Stevenson's marriage--his father and his loved one's husband, Mr. Osbourne. Stevenson wanted these men out of the way; they were the obstacles to his happiness. He wished that Mr. Osbourne were divorced and he entertained bitterness towards his father for showing such animosity to the match. Now we are not accusing Stevenson of a crime when we say that unconsciously the thought may have come to him if one or both of these men were dead his road to marriage would be easy. The dream of the murder of the father by the son is understood by all Freudians. It is not an uncommon one, especially where there is ill feeling between son and father, or where an over-attachment exists for the mother. It has its origin psychically in infancy when the father was looked upon as a rival of the infant in the affections of the mother, and the dream is given additional grounds for its entry when the relations between father and son continue or grow strained. It represents just what it portrays, the wish of the child for the father to be out of the way, or dead. When the child wishes some one dead he means he wants him absent; he has no conception of death. The dream of murdering one's own father then is evidence of hostile feeling entertained by the dreamer to his father either in infancy, where it is always entertained, or later in life. It represents a wish of the unconscious fulfilled, the removal of an obstacle to happiness. Needless to say it does not represent a conscious desire on the part of the dreamer in his waking hours to kill his father.

We know how strained Stevenson's relations with his father were. The elder Stevenson was not sympathetic to his son's liberal ideas and later he opposed him in his lovemaking. Two more serious oppositions to a young man, one to the inclinations of his intellect and the other to his love, can not be imagined. The novelist never realised what the feature of the murder of his father in his dream meant, and how it arose. If in his dream his father appeared as rich and wicked with a damnable temper, that is what Stevenson really thought his father was. In the dream the son lived abroad to avoid the father, and this Stevenson also actually did in life, and as a result, by the way, we have some of his early books of travel, and I dare say if these were closely examined evidence of his strained relations with his father would appear.

As we know, in dreams there is considerable distortion, and the person of our dream in an instant becomes another individual. This occurs in Stevenson's dream. No doubt the dreamer's father was actually made up of a combination of the elder Stevenson and Mr. Osbourne, both of whom Stevenson wished were out of the way. But a more important distortion takes place, the merging of the second wife of the dreamer's murdered father with the married woman in real life whom Stevenson loved. We recall that in the dream the dreamer lives with his father's second wife in the house after the murder, but there is a barrier between them, for the dreamer is haunted by the woman's possible knowledge of his guilt. He loves her really and they return arm in arm from the scene of the murder. He did not want her to know that he had committed the murder because he wanted to marry her. He searched her possessions for the evidence of the guilt she found and then bursts out asking why she tortures him, he is not an enemy of hers; that he really loves her, is implied. She also, it appears, had loved him and makes confession of the fact. No doubt this scene must be largely a picture of the proposal of Stevenson to his future wife. The situation depicted showing the feeling of guilt the dreamer has for his murder may be traced to his own guilty thoughts in actual life on account of his unconscious wishes for both husband and father to be out of the way. These feelings appear in the remorse of the murderer and in his suspicion of discovery by the woman he loves. We might trace the dream to much earlier material in Stevenson's life if we knew all the facts. We do know that he had an earlier love affair in youth in which he was disappointed and that he has left us poems celebrating that episode.

The dream concludes with the implication that the dreamer and the step-mother marry as they had confessed their love to one another; there are no longer any remorses or fears on one side or suspicions on the other, and the obstacles to the marriage, the objections of the dreamer's father, the legal ties of the husband to the beloved woman, have been removed. Stevenson wanted all this to happen in real life and later it incidentally did turn out that way. Both his father and the husband of Mrs. Osbourne were removed as barriers, the former by acquiescence and forgiving, the latter by divorce. The dreamer represents as fulfilled his wish to marry Mrs. Osbourne, with all opposition removed. The dreamer's father is both the elder Stevenson and Mr. Osbourne, the father and the husband respectively, made one in the dream; the second wife of the father, step-mother of the dreamer, becomes Mrs. Osbourne, Stevenson's love who became a wife a second time. Thus we have had what Freud calls condensation and displacement in the dream.

The dream sheds much light on the most important period of his life; it fits in with the facts left us by the biographer. We see what his repressed wishes were in those days and how they appeared realised in his dream.

Octavius sees in a museum a piece of lava that had cooled over a woman's breast and preserved its form. He falls in love with the original woman, though he knows she is dead. He is a fetich worshipper and is enamoured of ancient types of women preserved in art; he has even been cast into ecstasy by the sight of hair from a Roman woman's tomb. He dreams of the "glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." He is a pagan and loves form and beauty. In his dream that night he is transported to the year of the eruption of Vesuvius and witnesses a performance of a play by Plautus in a Roman theatre. Here he sees the real woman whose shapely breast had preserved its form in the lava that killed her. She also sees him and loves him. Her slave leads him to her home. She is a Roman courtesan and her name is Arria Marcella. She tells him that she has come to life because of his desire at the museum to meet her in life. His wish in waking life is fulfilled in his dream. As a matter of fact, as the poet comments, art preserves as alive all the beauty of antiquity.

Octavius realises his wish and, soon, kisses and sighs are heard. But the charm is soon dispelled, for a Christian man comes in who reproaches her, even though she did not belong to his religion. She refuses to abandon Octavius, but the Christian, by an exorcism, makes Arria release Octavius, who awakens and swoons. He loved her for the rest of his life and when he married later, in memory he was unfaithful to his wife, for he always thought of Arria.

The meaning of all this is obvious. It is an expression of Gautier's favourite theory that Christianity is hostile to love and beauty, and has deprived the world of much of the greatness of paganism. But there is more here than Gautier himself imagined. First, the story like all dreams is a wish-fulfilment of the unconscious. Not only the girl but the world of her time becomes a reality and Octavius lives in his dream in the pagan world. There are the moments of anxiety where the Christian interferes and hinders the satisfaction of Octavius's love. Freud's theory is that an anxiety dream is formed when a repressed emotion encounters a strong resistance.

Now Octavius is Gautier, who makes a work of art cut of the dream, preserves it for humanity and gives us a valuable thing of beauty. Gautier makes up for the ugliness of to-day by preserving the beauty of the past. Gautier satisfies his longing for the old pagan world now vanished by making his hero live in it and realise the love of one of its courtesans.

Gautier pursues the motive of this story in several other tales. He lives constantly in his fantasies amidst the beauties of the ancient world. It is hard to believe that many of his tales of phantom love scenes laid in ancient times were not actually dreamed by him.

What is the meaning of this story? How did Georgie come to love a girl he had known apparently only in his dreams? Where does the Policeman come in and what is the secret of the dream journeys on the Thirty Mile Road? Georgie's dreams were the fulfilment of his unconscious desires in waking life. He had actually seen his love in his childhood, was attracted towards her but apparently forgot about her. But the love was there nevertheless; it was repressed. He neither knew why he dreamed of her nor did he believe she actually existed. He conjured her up in the books he read and identified her with the princess of the fairy tales. Like the neurotic patient he did not know the cause of his anxieties; he could not fit altogether in the scheme of life; he was dreaming inexplicable dreams which were having an effect upon him in his waking hours. In a case like this we know that the dreams have a reality that makes them almost equivalent to events of the day. When he took those trips with her in his sleep he was fulfilling the unconscious wishes of his waking life. He suffered nightmares when anything interfered to take him away from her. The anxiety dream as Freud has explained shows that there has been an interference with the satisfying of the love desire.

Policeman Day is the cause of terror because he represents the time when the dreams do not occur, day time, when he becomes the symbol of love unrealised, for in the day Georgie is no longer with his love. Policeman Day is consciousness opposed to unconsciousness, reality opposed to illusion. Miss Lacy also felt this when she sang the song with the refrain,

Oh pity us! Ah, pity us! We wakeful! Oh, pity us! We that go back with Policeman Day Back from the City of Sleep.

She also was with Georgie in her dreams and dreaded waking. He also was present in her unconscious and she never really forgot the boy she had met as a child, although she had no conscious memory of him. Their infantile impressions were powerful and ruled them all the time till they met again. They dreamed they were with each other because they wanted to be with each other. He guessed she wrote the poem because she had felt as he did. The poem was an anxiety poem, voicing the unconscious desire to be with the loved one. It represents the state of mind of both lovers; he had also felt the sentiments of the poem, but she put them in words. When he came back to England he was unconsciously going to find the ideal of his dreams, the original Annie-an-louise. When he found her he was cured of his dreams and anxieties. Their meeting acted like a cure for their mysterious longings. All their dreams were made up of infantile fantasies and represented repressions. The marriage satisfies these repressions.

I dare say Kipling was his own model for the Brushwood Boy.

This disposes of any interpretations based on mere mental telepathy between George and Miss Lacy. They had the same feelings because they suffered the same repression and had met and loved each other in infancy.

Brandes said in his book on Shakespeare:

"As, knowing the life and experiences of the great modern poet, we are generally able to trace how these are worked upon and transformed in his works, it is reasonable to suppose that in olden times poets were moved by the same causes, acted in the same way, at least those of them who have been efficient. When we know of the adventures and emotions of the modern poet, and are able to trace them in the productions of his free fancy; when it is possible, where they are unknown to us, to evolve the hidden personality of the poet and--as every capable critic has experienced--to have our conjectures finally borne out by facts revealed by the contemporary author, then we cannot feel it to be impossible, that in the case of an older poet, we might also be successful in determining when he speaks earnestly from his heart, and in tracing his feelings and experiences through his work, especially when they are lyrical, and their mode of expression passionate and emotional."

Just as we can build up a picture of a modern author from dreams he reports, we can do the same with ancient authors.

The key to these deductions is furnished by a section of the twenty-third book, of about fifty lines, of which John Addington Symonds says, "There is surely nothing more thrilling in its pathos throughout the whole range of poetry." Achilles sees Patroclus in his dreams, who recalls to him their youthful days and asks to be buried with him and foretells Achilles's own death. The warrior promises to grant his friend's requests and pleads: "But stand nearer to me, that embracing each other for a little while, we may indulge in sad lamentation." Achilles tried in vain to touch him, and told his comrades afterwards: "All night the spirit of poor Patroclus stood by me, groaning and lamenting, and enjoined to me each particular and was wonderfully like unto himself." All this has too authentic and personal a touch for any one not to feel that Homer was reporting a dream of his own and was attributing it to Achilles. The poet had also spent restless nights and saw his dead friend before him "wonderfully like unto himself"; the dream was very vivid to him, and more so if as tradition reports he was blind.

No indeed, Homer was no mere spectator reciting Achilles's troubles in an objective manner. He had a great sorrow of his own and he did not go out of the way to counterfeit one. He sang his own loss; he told his own dream; Achilles was the medium through which he told the world of his own troubles. Patroclus's prophecy that Achilles would die soon shows that Homer after his loss had wished he too would die, and Homer must have dreamt that his own end would come soon, in accordance with the principle that we often dream as happening or about to happen what we wish to take place. He saw his friend in his dream just as we all do because we wish our friends to be still with us. This dream then is the clue to the tragedy of Homer's life.

So Homer had loved a friend and suffered. Like Patroclus, he hoped his friend wanted to be buried with him; at least Homer wanted to have his own bones repose near those of his friend. What the nature of the friendship was we cannot say; it may have been homosexual, a love which was common among the later Greeks. But it did have the element of passion. We know now the chief event of Homer's life. What the details were we cannot say. It is rather unsafe to guess. But there are a few facts that appear, whose import is significant. Achilles, we recall, resolved to fight the Trojans again only because they killed Patroclus. He was now ready to forget Agamemnon's wrong to him in depriving him of his captive woman. He knew that by his new resolve he would lose his life. He was willing to die for his friend. Homer's love for his friend was also so great that he too would no doubt have given up his life for him. This I believe establishes the passionate element in the friendship of both warrior and poet.

Again, Achilles blames himself for Patroclus's death. Had he not withdrawn from the fight, the Trojans would not have gained any victories and not have killed his friend. In short, he had been too sensitive, proud and sulky; he had been too easy a prey to anger and revenge. Now he was suffering remorse. This indicates that Homer had quarrels with his friend. We know by psychoanalysis that people who lose by death a loved one feel guilt stricken if in life they had hostile wishes against the person; in fact they attribute the death to these secret emotions. The remorse is a reaction to the hostile wishes, and it is possible, but I do not wish to press this point, that Homer's friend was either ostracised or shunned by many for some idiosyncrasy or event in his past life for which he was not to blame and hence the poet loved him the more. Patroclus reminds Achilles in the dream that as a child, he, Patroclus, had killed a playmate. This detail would not have been invented by a poet writing impersonally. Homer thought of some event in the life of his own friend.

It is only right to conclude that the same motives and principles of singing which actuated later poets prompted the earlier ones. If Milton appears in Lucifer, Goethe in Faust and Mephistopheles, Shakespeare in Hamlet, there can be no question Homer has drawn himself in Achilles and an intimate friend of his in Patroclus.

After having formed this theory, I discovered the following significant passage in Plato's Republic, Book X, "For we are told that even Creophylus neglected Homer singularly in his lifetime."

THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX AND THE BROTHER AND SISTER COMPLEX

The influence of the writer's attitude towards his father or mother appears in his literary work. Stendhal has left us a record of the intense child love he had for his mother; he hated his father. One can see the results of these conditions in his life, work and beliefs. He became an atheist, since people who throw off the influence of their fathers often cast aside also their belief in a universal father. This also explains largely the atheism of Shelley, whose relations with his father were not cordial. The essay on the necessity of atheism was the cause of Shelley's expulsion from Oxford University.

An extreme attachment to the mother is the nucleus of future neurosis. If the mother is intensely loved by her infant son or boy, and then she dies, he will still be looking for a mother substitute, as it were. Freud's deduction about the mysterious smile of the Mona da Lisa is very plausible; it was in all likelihood the unconscious reproduction by the artist of his mother's smile which he rediscovered in another woman.

Cowper wrote the poem celebrating his love for his mother "not without tears." On actually receiving the picture he kissed it and hung it where it was the last object he saw at night and the first that met his eyes in the morning. In the poem he becomes a child again. The intervening fifty-two years drop out of his life; he is back with his mother and he narrates his infantile impressions. The psychoanalyst who is aware that this child's affection for his mother is its first love affair, will observe that Cowper in his poem is giving us reminiscences of a childish fantasy that shaped the course of his whole life. His insanity and fits of depression, his sentimental and platonic attachments to old ladies, his religious mania, are apparent, in the germ, in this poem.

The poet recalls the affection and tenderness lavished upon him by his mother; he relates how he felt at her death, and was deceived by the maids who told him that she would return. He again sees her in her nightly visits to him in his chamber to see him laid away safe to sleep. He mentions the biscuits she gave him, dwells on her constant flow of love and on the way she stroked his head and smiled. He thus re-lives those days. One should remember these are the reflections of a man fifty-eight years old. In his troubles he still looks back to her for support. He contrasts his position then with his situation now. He is suffering from depression and the memory of many griefs. His dead mother is like a bark safe in port.

"But me scarce hoping to attain that rest, Always from port withheld, always distressed, Me howling blasts drive devious, tempests tossed, Sails ripping, seams opening wide, and compass lost. And day by day some current's thwarting force Sets me more distant from a prosperous course."

It of course displeases people to have any association made between the noblest sentiment, mother love, and so repulsive a feature as incest. When Freud interpreted the marriage of OEdipus to his mother both from a historical and psychological point of view, and called attention to the dream in the play where the Chorus mentions the most obnoxious dream that sometimes visits us mortals, that of incestuous relationship with the mother, he opened up a new field not only in psychology but in medicine. Psychoanalytic treatment has cured many people whose neurosis arose from the early attachment to the mother from which they were finally freed. Cowper was a victim of the OEdipus Complex; it was buried in his unconscious and in this poem of his he shows that the seeds that were sown fifty-two years ago were still bearing fruit. Literature can hardly furnish so good an example of the influence of the OEdipus Complex through so great a distance of time.

In this poem Cowper put his hand unknowingly on the cause of all his troubles, but he never realised it. Had the poem been written in his twenties instead of his late fifties, the subliminal process of freeing himself by art from his OEdipus Complex might have made his life more pleasant. The fact that the poem was written so late shows that the unhealthy attachment clung to him all his life; it ruined him mentally and gave us his strange personality.

Freud has shown us that psychoneuroses, like hysteria and obsessions, have their origin in an infantile overattachment to the parent of the opposite sex, which remains unconscious but nevertheless is an active and disturbing element. It is perfectly natural that this condition should exist in infancy, but it disappears in the normal person. If it does not, one's entire life will be influenced by his inability to overcome the too intense love for mother or infantile hatred for the father. If a man has had an unfortunate repression in childhood such as the early death of a mother he loved intensely, his destiny in life will be affected. This fact has been understood by people from time immemorial. If an abnormal situation develops like a hatred in childhood for the mother, the child's life will be in the future shaped differently from that of most people. People especially are influenced in the way they react to the world and to love affairs by the frustration or repression of their earliest love. If they become writers their literary work is charged with a certain tone, depending on the nature of the author's relation with his parents.

Why were Schopenhauer and Byron such pessimists? Among the many causes that later in life contributed to impart the note of woe and despair to their work, was the fact that both men were in unusually unhappy relations with their mothers and their quarrels with them are matters of literary history. Why are men like Lafcadio Hearn and Edgar Allan Poe the unhappy Ishmaelites in literature, with their morbid and weird ideas? They both lost in infancy or early childhood mothers to whom they were greatly attached.

Facts like these have great significance. It is not claimed that other factors do not go into the making of the man, but his relations with his parents is the earliest cause in determining his mental, moral and emotional make up. A man who hates his father sees in many of his future enemies the image of his father. One who is overattached to his mother looks unconsciously for her counterpart, among women, in seeking his mate. He sees a reminder of his father in those people who interfere with his plans, ambitions and conduct. He sees the father in the rivals he has in love affairs, just as in infancy he found in his father his rival in the affections of his mother. This seemingly absurd and repellent view has been scientifically demonstrated by Freud and his disciples so that I refer objectors to it to their works.

The influence of step-mothers has always been noted in ancient times and the amount of material in folk lore dealing with the effects of step-mothers on the lives of children is large. We are all familiar with the Cinderella story. Literature is rich in examples of writers whose step-mothers coloured their lives for them. Strindberg's misogyny no doubt dates back to his early dislike for his step-mother.

The fact that the mothers of Coleridge and Dickens had almost no influence upon them is seen in their work.

The relation of the only child to its parents must be mentioned here. The studies of both Freud and Brill in regard to the later neurotic condition of the only child applies to literary men who were only children. John Ruskin, although subjected to a strict education, was petted and spoiled nevertheless like the average only child. His precociousness made his parents admire and worship him. He was attached to his "papa" and "mamma" for the rest of their lives. He was not young when they died and he preserved the attitude of the child towards them. His mother lived to a great age. When he was separated from his wife he returned to his parents to live. His later tragedy, the unmanly love for Rose Le Touche, which forms a most humiliating affair in his life, shows he was a neurotic from childhood. He was in the later part of his life subject to periods of psychosis. In his actions he was eccentric; he would be invited to lecture on art and would give a talk on economics.

His passions were love of beauty in the early part of his life, and interest in economic reform in his middle and old age.

Alexander Pope, the poet, was also a spoiled child, though he had a half sister.

The seeds of Browning's optimistic philosophy were sown in the normal and quiet affection that existed between him and his mother. There was no mad attachment, no repression, no ill feeling, and hence he never became an abnormal or morbid poet. He had less neuroticism than any of the great English poets of the nineteenth century. His optimism was also fostered by his happy marriage to Elizabeth Barrett.

Freud's theories about the relations of the child to the parents are borne out whenever we consider the life of a poet.

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