The Erotic Motive in Literature

Albert Mordell

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780415789127
• eBook ISBN: 9781351839495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This work, first published in 1919, is an endeavour to apply some of the methods of psychoanalysis to literature. It traces a writer's books back to the outward and inner events of their life and to reveal of their unconscious. This unconscious is largely identical with the mental love fantasies in our present and past life. Since the terms 'unconscious' and 'erotic' are almost synonymous, any serious study of literature which is concerned with the unconscious must deal impartially with eroticism.

CHAPTER XI

SEXUAL SYMBOLISM IN LITERATURE

I

THE repression of the libido includes the damming and clogging up of all the emotional concomitants that go with sexual attraction and make up the feeling called love. Whenever then sex or libido is referred to in psychoanalysis the word has the widest meaning. The man who loves a woman with the greatest affection and passion, without gratifying these, suffers a repression of the libido, as well as the man who satisfies certain proclivities without feeling any tenderness or love for the woman. In the emotion felt towards the other sex called love, in which admiration, respect, self-sacrifice, tenderness and other finer feelings play a great part, there is consciously or unconsciously, however, the physical attraction. If this is totally absent the emotion cannot be called “love.” What differentiates our feelings towards one of the opposite sex from those felt for one of the same sex (assuming there are no homosexual leanings) is the presence of this sexual interest. Love then must satisfy a man physically as well as psychically. It is a concentration of the libido upon a person of the opposite sex, accompanied by tender feelings.

Hence when we read the most chaste love poem, we see what is the underlying motive in the poet’s unconscious. He may write with utter devotion to the loved one and express a wish to die for her, and though he says nothing about physical attraction, we all know that it is there in his unconscious. It is taken for granted that a man who writes a real love poem to a girl wants to enjoy her love. And when the poet complains because he is rejected or deceived, or of something interfering with the course of his love, we are aware also that his unconscious is grieved because his union is impeded or entirely precluded. The suffering is greater the more he loves, for his finer instincts, as well as his passion, are prevented from being fulfilled.

Let us take at random a few innocent poems and test the theory. There is Ben Jonson’s well known toast, “Drink to me only with thine eyes.” He tells how he sent Celia a rose wreath, that she breathed on it and sent it back to him.

“Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,

Not of itself but thee.”

Odour is an important feature, it is well known, in sexual attraction. In this poem the poet, after having received the returned rose breathed upon by Celia, smells her perfume, which now submerges the natural fragrance of the rose. In other words the poet’s unconscious says that he wishes to possess Celia physically. He is talking symbolically in the poem.

There is the song in Tennyson’s “The Miller’s Daughter,” beginning “It is the miller’s daughter.” The poet says naïvely enough that he would like to be the jewel in her ear in order to touch her neck, the girdle about her waist (“I’d clasp it round so close and tight”), and the necklace upon her balmy bosom to fall and rise; “I would lie so light, so light.” The unconscious sexual feelings here are only too apparent. The symbols of the earring, girdle and necklace are unmistakable. The poet is saying in a symbolical manner that he would possess the miller’s daughter.

Moreover one may see the sex motive in poems where it does not seem to appear. If certain facts in an author’s life are known, we may discern the unconscious love sentiments in poems where no mention seems to be made of them. Let me illustrate with a fine poem by Longfellow, the familiar “The Bridge.” Take the lines

“How often, O how often,

I had wished that the ebbing tide

Would bear me away in its bosom

O’er the ocean wild and wide!

“For my heart was hot and restless,

And my life was full of care,

And the burden laid upon me

Seemed greater than I could bear.

“But now it has fallen from me, etc.”

To the student of Longfellow, this poem speaks of the time he found it difficult to win the love of his second wife, Frances Appleton, love for whom he confessed in his novel Hyperion, where he drew her and himself. This story was published before she had as yet reciprocated his love. He married her July 13, 1843. He finished the poem October 9, 1845. At the end of this year he wrote in his diary that now he had love fulfilled and his soul was enriched with affection. He is therefore thinking of the time when he had no love and longed for it, and now that he has it, he is thinking of the love troubles of others. In the olden days he wanted to be carried away by the river Charles, for his long courtship, seemingly hopeless, made his heart hot and restless and his life full of care. So we see that in this poem the poet was thinking of something definite, relating to love (and hence also sex), though there is no mention of either in the poem.

It is well known that all love complaints are the cries of the Jack who cannot get his Jill; or who has lost the possibility of love happiness by desertion, deception or death.

Read that fine and pathetic Scotch ballad, beginning “O waly, waly up the bank.” The girl (or woman) has been forsaken by her lover and expects to become a mother. She longs for death. She complains about the cruelty of love grown cold; she recalls the happy days. Her unconscious sentiment is that her lover will never give her spiritual happiness or satisfy her craving. Her life is empty. The poem was based on an actual occurrence. It contains all the despair of love that was once given and then withdrawn.

“O wherefore should I busk my head,

Or wherefore should I kame my hair?

“When we came in by Glasgow town

We were a comely sight to see;

My love was clad in the black velvet

And I myself in cramasie.”

She does not want to dress herself gorgeously now as she has no lover. Among other great love wails by a woman are the old Saxon elegy “A Woman’s Complaint” and the second Idyl of Theocritus.

All the pain of frustrated love is due to the repressing of the tender as well as of the physical emotions, to the damming up of the libido, which is love in its broadest sense.

Sometimes the poets tell us almost plainly their real loss, or suggest it in such a manner that we feel the thought has become conscious in the poem. Read in Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” the fifteen lines beginning, “Is it well to wish thee happy,” and one can see that the victim is suffering because Amy is in another’s embrace rather than in that of the singer’s. He thinks with maddening thoughts of the clown she married.

“He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel forces,

Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.”

He calls sarcastically upon Amy to kiss her husband and take his hand. “He will answer to the purpose.” The singer clearly shows his pain because he has been cheated out of physical pleasure.

When we come to the decadent poets, the loss is sung plainly. One of the most beautiful poems of this kind is Dowson’s Cynara. The poem is frankly sexual. The poet, who was rejected by a restaurant keeper’s daughter, tries to console himself with another woman for his loss. The words “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion” mean he loves her in others. He tries to satisfy himself partly by thinking he is with her while he is with another. It is a poem showing how a sexual repression seeks an outlet with some one who did not arouse it and how the poet forces himself to imagine that he is with the one who created it. The poem makes this clear, that a love poem is always a complaint that the libido is being dammed.

It is therefore true to say that even in the tenderest and sweetest love lyrics, like those of Burns and Shelley for instance, one sees the play of unconscious sexual forces. This fact does not make the poem and the less moral or the poet any the less pure.

II

Probably the greatest objection to the application of psychoanalytic methods to literature will be made to the transference of the sexual interpretation of symbols from the realm of dreams to that of art. But if the interpretation is correct in one sphere it is also true in the other. Civilisation has made it necessary to refer in actual speech to sexual matters in hidden ways, by symbolic representations; our faculty of wit, due to the exercise of the censorship, also uses various devices of symbolisation. Dreams and literature both make use of the same symbols.

When Freud attributed sexual significance to certain typical dreams like those of riding, flying, swimming, climbing, and to certain objects, like rooms, boxes, snakes, trees, burglars, etc., he made no artificial interpretations. He merely pointed out the natural and concrete language of the unconscious.

Now the same interpretation must inevitably follow in literature, much as authors and readers may object. If flying in dreams is symbolic of sex, then an author who is occupied considerably with wishes to be a bird and fly or with descriptions of birds flying—I do not mean an isolated instance—is like the man who is always dreaming he is flying; he is unconsciously expressing a symbolical wish. Many poems written to birds in literature show unconscious sexual manifestations. Shelley’s “To A Skylark,” Keats’s “To A Nightingale” and Poe’s “Raven” are poems where the authors sang of repressed love; there is unconscious sex symbolism in them.

Wordsworth, one of the poets who rarely mentioned sex, has in his “To a Skylark” unconsciously given us a poem of sexual significance. The motive of the poem is the intense longing to fly. But beneath the wish to fly in the poem, as in the imaginary flying in the dream, a sexual meaning is concealed. The poet is sad when he writes the poem “I have walked through wildernesses dreary, and to-day my heart is weary.” He also thinks of the fact that the bird is satisfied in love. “Thou hast a nest for thy love and thy rest.”

Very few of the poems addressed to birds harp on the wish to fly to the extent that Wordsworth does in this poem. Nearly half of the poem is taken up with this wish, and for this reason the sexual interpretation is unmistakable.

The first two stanzas are as follows:

“Up with me! up with me into the clouds!

For thy song, Lark, is strong;

Up with me, up with me into the clouds!

Singing, singing,

With clouds and sky about thee ringing,

Lift me, guide me till I find

That spot which seems so to thy mind!

“I have walked through wildernesses dreary

And to-day my heart is weary;

Had I now the wings of a Fairy,

Up to thee would I fly.

There is madness about thee, and joy divine,

In that song of thine;

Lift me, guide me high and high

To thy banqueting place in the sky.”

The wish in literature corresponds to the fulfilment in the dream, and the psychology of the poet who wishes to fly is like that of the dreamer who does fly. Unconscious sex symbolism is voiced in poems where the poet expresses a desire to be a bird, or fly like one, such as those by Bernard de Ventadorn, the great Troubadour of the twelfth century, “The Cuckoo,” by Michael Bruce, the Scotch poet who died young from consumption, and others.

I quote from memory the chorus of a poem sung in my school days:

“Oh, had I wings to fly like you

Then would I seek my love so true,

And never more we’d parted be,

But live and love eternally.”

The author here tells us most plainly why he or she wants to fly like a bird—for the satisfaction of love. He says practically that merely by flying like the bird, he would have the embrace of the loved one. The opening lines of the chorus show that it is no far-fetched idea, that of seeing sex or love symbolism in birds flying or singing.

We recall Burns’s famous poem to the bonny bird that sings happily and reminds him of the time when his love was true. “Thou’ll break my heart, thou bonny bird,” he sings in despair. A false lover stole the rose and left the thorn with him. The entire poem is full of sex symbolism. That he too would like to have love, is what he says when he speaks of the bird singing.

“The more one is occupied with the solution of dreams,” says Freud, “the more willingly one must become to acknowledge that the majority of the dreams of adults treat of sexual material and give expression to erotic wishes…. No other impulse has had to undergo as much suppression from the time of childhood as the sex impulses in its numerous components; from no other impulse has survived so many and such intense unconscious wishes, which now act in the sleeping state in such a manner as to produce dreams.”

This, to my mind, can not be contested, and these wishes appear largely in the form of symbols. In early times sex was given great significance, and we know that in early myths and literature many events and things were sex symbols. When we dream symbolically, we go back to a method of picturing events that in early history had value, but of which the significance has been forgotten. The law of symbol formation is in dreams not an arbitrary one; it is based on forms of speech in the past and on witty conceptions of to-day. Folklore and wit are full of sexual symbols corresponding to those in dreams. All doubt has been removed of sexual symbolism in dreams by an experiment made by means of hypnotism, where a patient was told to dream some sexual situation. Instead of doing so directly she dreamed a situation in symbolic form corresponding to that in ordinary dream life. Rank and Sachs in their The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental Sciences have given us an excellent study of the nature of symbol formation. Freud has furnished us a list of objects and actions that are of sexual significance. W. Stekel has made an exhaustive study of the subject in his Sprache des Traumes (1911). Freud recognises R. A. Schemer as the true discoverer of symbolism in dreams in his book Das Lebendes Traumes (1896), but he admits that Artemidorus in the second century A.D. also interpreted dreams symbolically.

Freud ventures the opinion that dreams about complicated machinery and landscapes and trees have a definite sexual significance. If this is so, and he gives his reason therefor, it would mean that all those authors who have a partiality for describing landscapes and machinery in their works continually, are unconsciously revealing a personal trait they never intended to convey. Ruskin for example is rich in landscapes in his works. Is there any connection between his propensity for such description and his attachment to his mamma, his youthful love disappointment, his unsuccessful marriage and his sad love for Rose La Touche? Is it not likely that many of the painters who made a specialty of landscape painting were driven to this special choice by an unconscious cause that the world has not fathomed, a sexual one? No doubt there is a connection between paintings of female nudes and the sex life of the author in his unconscious; why should not the same be true of the landscape painters and all the writers who abound in landscape descriptions? Is it not possible that Turgenev, who has given us so many landscapes, was unconsciously thinking of his first love disappointment and also of his love for Madame Viardot? We find landscapes in every literary work that deals with the country, but Freud’s theory can have applicability only to the author...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• I Introduction
• II Eroticism in Life
• III Dreams and Literature
• IV The ŒDipus Complex and the Brother and Sister Complex
• V The Author Always Unconsciously in His Work
• VI Unconscious Consolatory Mechanisms in Authorship
• VII Projection, Villain Portrayals and Cynicism as Work of the Unconscious
• VIII Genius as a Product of the Unconscious
• IX Literary Emotions and the Neuroses
• X The Infantile Love Life of the Author and Its Sublimations
• XI Sexual Symbolism in Literature
• XII Cannibalism: The Atreus Legend
• XIII Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism
• XIV Keats’ Personal Love Poems
• XV Shelley’s Personal Love Poems
• XVI Psychoanalytic Study of Edgar Allan Poe
• XVII The Ideas of Lafcadio Hearn
• XVIII Conclusion