Short Stories and their Psychoanalytical Readings

Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Rappaccini’s Daughter”

 Technology and science
 Science ←→ human liberty
 Nature vs. Nurture
 Good and bad herbs → symbolic
 Purple – hybrid

What is a garden?

 Cultivation
 Organising, modifying nature
 “Distrustful Gardener”
 Dead leaves & luxuriant overgrowth

Garden of Eden

 Joy & labour

 Eden: Eros & Thanatos
 Separation → threatening
 The best Eden in this world – Poisonous

Biblical, Religious undertone

 Set in Italy
 Biblical Garden of Eden + Dante’s medieval conception of Hell
 Giovanni’s residence = one of Dante’s characters from Inferno lived there
 Ironical reference to The Inferno
 Heaven is unreachable
 Blamed for Adam’s fall
 Dante’s Beatrice saved and escorted him into Heaven
 A twisted Creation story
 Beatrice = Eve ▪ Giovanni = Adam
 Rappaccini = God and Satan at the same time

How does Rappaccini reverse God’s creation?

 Poisonous plants
 A poisonous Eve first, not Adam
 Hell of isolation
 An inverse of Eden, a heavenly hell
 God’s garden – the tree of life
 Rappaccini – the deadly shrub

What is the role of Baglioni in this reversed Eden?

 Satan – tempts Adam, not Eve

 Being excluded from “Paradise”
To beat Rappaccini in scientific rivalry

1. Very cautious critic with praise

2. More open critic, sympathy & distrust

3. Legitimising his story with another

4. Seeing how Giovanni feels → You and Beatrice are the victims of Rappaccini → giving the antidote,
helping them

What is Beatrice?

 Hybrid
 Femme Fatale
 Temptation
 Poisonous

A Typical Victorian Femme Fatale Story

 A seductive woman luring men into dangerous or compromising situations

 ←→ The source of Beatrice’s fatal power
 Her father → gothic story
 (Svengali =) Rappaccini = gazing, intellect & control
 Beatrice = odour, parfume
 No control, the body is always behind the odour
 Beatrice = Baglioni’s medicine
 Beautiful container
 Death inside

Emotional and Intellectual Lives

 No balance → damnation
 Ruined fountain = microcosm of the fallen world cursed by sin and death
 World that might ensue → knowledge and power valued more than human love
 Moral undertone

Fountain – polluted water?

 Beatrice’s innocent spirit - fountain

 Water = origin, life= Energies in the psyche ,water = libido
 The principle of constancy
 To maintain the same energy level, the desire to release tension
 to create more complex units (Eros)
 ←→ return to an earlier stage that requires the least energy (Thanatos)
 pleasure principle – immediate please
 reality principle - deals to wait for pleasure
 Eros ←→ Thanatos
 Water = libido → NATURE
 Fountain = human made → ART, Culture
 Culture comes out from the energies of nature
 ←→ it erodes culture (giving form)
Fall: his shallow capacity for love

▪ It was now the customary hour of his daily interview with Beatrice. Before descending into the
garden, Giovanni failed not to look at his figure in the mirror,—a vanity to be expected in a beautiful
young man, yet, as displaying itself at that troubled and feverish moment, the token of a certain
shallowness of feeling and insincerity of character. He did gaze, however, and said to himself that his
features had never before possessed so rich a grace, nor his eyes such vivacity, nor his cheeks so
warm a hue of superabundant life.

 Narcissistic love → mirror scene

 Giovanni is not in love
 He enters into his own imagination
 A grotesque mother figure initiates him into that world (Oedipus?)

Aggression

 The world distorts our desire – external resistance → to damage sg weaker than me / myself
→ the reservoir is the Libido
 Eros and Thanatos can use each other
 Eros uses Thanatos: masochism, sadism
 It is an analogy of Eros and Thanatos → I want that will kill me
 Pain and Pleasure
 Dante’s Inferno – eternal repetition of suffering – immortal agonies

Edgar Allen Poe: “The Fall of the House of Usher”

A Gothic Tale

 Haunted house, Dreary landscape

 Mysterious sickness
 Doubled personality
 Real ←→ fantastic
 Ambiguity, Claustrophobia
 Tale of terror
 Tale of arabesque= something is complex, you can find many figures in it, something that
seems to be easier than it is → underlying story
 confusion between the living things and inanimate objects
 physical house of Usher + the genetic family line
 → The features of the characters
 Twins → cannot develop as free individuals
 Madeline = her similarity to Roderick is like a coffin, holding her identity
 Madeline = identity in her body
 Roderick = intellect.
 Philosophical mystery of the relationship between mind and body
 Twins + incest = Roderick + Madeline are inseparable
 Madeline does not even exist (?)
 Symmetrical and claustrophobic logic
Mourning and Melancholia

 1915 – Mourning and Melancholia by Freud

 reactions to the loss of an object (of love)
 melancholia: the object is internalised
 mourning goes wrong, pathological mourning
 We are expected to behave pathologically for a while
 Too long mourning = melancholia (Freud)
 Freud wants to establish a qualitative difference
 Qualitative: Mourning – normal ←→ Melancholia – abnormal
 Quantitative: Mourning – period ←→ Melancholia – endless
 Mourning : we are simply sad
 Melancholia: begin to reproach ourselves – even suicide is a possibility

What is the traditional period of mourning?

 The dead body is still there, the soul/spirit is still there – the mirrors must be covered
 Ritually defined “proper duration” of mourning in tribal community: the person who is in
mourning is separated from the community for 6 days
 The psyche doesn’t lose any object it loved –internalising it
 Ego: comes into existence through identification and loss
 Mourning: affection, desire is internalised (withdrawal of cathexis)
 Libido is internalised
 Julia Kristeva: mourning =“Black Sun”
 Introjection - ambivalent
 Guarantee not to lose the object
 Melancholia- a Narcissistic approach
 The very object is introjected, not the desire
 Melancholia - anxiety
 Melancholia: self –isolation, self- reproach, excessive reaction
 The melancholic doesn’t seem to know what is lost
 Mourning-work (slow work)
 Penelopé
 millions of threads connect us to the object of love –they have to be removed
 possibility of position = memories

To Develop Melancholia

 Internalising the object – introjection

 Objects of love = objects of hate
 Unconscious process – negative Narcissism
 nothing beyond the pleasure principle
 Superego: love→hate
 not only libido is withdrawn → hatred
 2 self- centred pathological stages in which the object is stronger than the Ego
 maniac depression = anxiety → energy will find an outlet somehow → release of excessive,
unused Libido
 mourning, melancholia: inner fights
 Loss = passivity
What does Madeline Symbolise?

 Love object
 The object of mourning
 Allegorical formation
 An attempt to concretise a form of being
 Roderick = the longing
 The narrator : inexplicable reaction to the House, not the house itself

How is Roderick Usher’s room described?

 Windows = so high up you can’t reach them

 Huge, lofty = you are inside, you don’t have the power to get out
 The corners can’t be seen = self-reflection, the mind reflects on itself
 Collapse from inside
 The room is full of furniture and abandoned objects of activities → he is unable to act
 the world as such is meaningless --it’s my responsibility to give meaning
 melancholy =inventing perspective → I know that I give the meaning, and it’s not infinite
 House+ its reflection in the lake (Narcissism)
 The house collapses into the process of reflection
 Problem of representation itself
 Split – vertical: on the house + Horizontal: housereflection
 Arts = source of pleasure, joy (Lacan)
 You can work trauma = by repeating it
 Mental deconstruction of Roderick Usher
 Split separates the house → split personality
 No definite solution in the end → infinite number of interpretations in the end
 Atmospheric
 Absence of reason
 Romantic overflow of emotions