Imaginary Existences

A psychoanalytic exploration of phantasy, fiction, dreams and daydreams

Ignes Sodre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317644682
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Imaginary Existences: A psychoanalytic exploration of phantasy, fiction, dreams and daydreams interweaves scholarly psychoanalytic knowledge and extensive clinical experience with insights derived from close readings of great literature in a uniquely imaginative and creative manner, convincingly demonstrating how these two ways of thinking – psychoanalysis and literary criticism – organically relate to each other. This is simultaneously a psychoanalytic book and a book about literature, illuminating the imaginative possibilities present within both the psychoanalytic encounter and the act of reading fiction. Scholarly and well researched, the psychoanalytic ideas presented have their basis in the work of Freud and Klein and some of their followers; the extensive and innovative writing about the great authors in Western literature is equally scholarly and lucent.

Here, Ignês Sodré explores creativity itself and, specifically, the impediments to creative thinking: defences, mostly narcissistic, against dependency, guilt and loss, and the mis-use of imagination to deny reality. In her studies of the characters created by authors such as George Eliot, Cervantes, Flaubert, Thomas Mann, Proust and Shakespeare, Sodré examines the way great writers create characters who mis-use their imagination, twisting reality into romantic daydreams or sado-masochistic enactments, which petrify experience and freeze the fluidity of thought. Her clinical studies continue and expand this theme, broadening the field and lending verification and weight to the arguments.

These two poles of Sodré's thinking – psychoanalysis and literature – interact seamlessly in Imaginary Existences; the two disciplines work together, each an intimate part of a learned exploration of the human condition: our desires, our fears and our delusions. This convergence pays tribute to the great depth of the fictional work being studied and to the psychological validity of the psychoanalytic ideas. This book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychotherapists, literary critics, and those interested in literature and literary criticism.

1

MAGGIE AND DOROTHEA

Reparation and working through in George Eliot’s novels¹

When she was working as a literary reviewer, just before she started writing fiction, George Eliot wrote about Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister:

He is in no haste to alarm readers into virtue by melodramatic consequences; he quietly follows the stream of fact and life; and waits patiently for the moral processes of nature as we all do for her material processes.

(Ashton 1983: 17)

She was describing something she particularly admired in a great writer, and strived to do when she was writing her own novels, some of which are among the greatest ever written.

One of these, the much-loved The Mill on the Floss, has a much-criticised ending. This is what she wrote in the last part of the novel, when she must have known, whilst simultaneously not knowing, that she was, exactly, ‘hasting to alarm readers into virtue by melodramatic consequences’ (she was responding to Novalis’s ‘Character is destiny’):

But you have known Maggie a long while, and need to be told, not her characteristics, but her history, which is hardly to be predicted even from the completest knowledge of her characteristics. For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within

(Eliot 1979: 514)

True about life, not true about fiction: the creative writer does have omnipotent control over her story; she is the God choosing to end her novel with this particular tragedy, which is created entirely from within her mind. And yet, at a different level, of course things are not so simple; a great writer has her own ‘tragedies created from within’, and suffers the compelling pull of wishful thinking and fantasising as we all do. Having said that ‘All truth and beauty [should be] attained by a humble and faithful study of Nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination in the mists of feelings, in place of substantial reality’ (Pinion 1982: 67) George Eliot was at that moment unable to protect herself from the danger she understood so well.

That this is her most autobiographical novel must have increased that danger. But one of the reasons why the ending is disappointing is that in Maggie, a character as fully brought to life as it is possible to be, she explored with great psychological perceptiveness the very question of a pathological tendency to daydreaming, to escaping painful substantial reality through fantasy solutions. I will suggest here that the flawed ending, in which the heroine dies in a most self-gratifying, unrealistic way, stayed in her mind as an unresolved conflict which needed to seek resolution elsewhere; something needed working through. Taking as my starting point the problematic ending of The Mill on the Floss I will discuss the possibility that the conflict between psychologically truthful imagination and idealisation-based fantasy solutions may be re-experienced by a different character, in a different novel, so that a more mature solution can be found.

I will also discuss the idea that the mechanisms which necessarily accompany idealisation – the splitting off and projection of negative and undesirable aspects – may take place in a way which is possible to uncover. For this purpose, I will focus on an aspect of the story The Lifted Veil – written during the time when George Eliot was struggling with the writing of The Mill – which contains some elements which seem to belong to the end of the novel. In the second part of this chapter I will examine the conflict which is not worked through in the end of The Mill and the different ways in which George Eliot deals with this conflict in the story of Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, written 11 years and three major novels later.

The ending of The Mill on the Floss: Maggie’s death

Maggie Tulliver’s childhood and her relationship with her brother Tom are closely based on George Eliot’s extremely important relationship with her own brother Isaac. At the time of writing The Mill she had no contact with Isaac, who had severed all links with her from the moment she started living, unmarried, with George Henry Lewes until, after Lewes’s death, and near the end of her life, she became a ‘respectable’ Mrs John Cross. She felt deeply grateful for her brother’s forgiveness, just as, many years before, she had imagined Maggie feeling in her final reconciliation with Tom. The relationship with this profoundly loved older brother seems to have remained in her mind as an ideal image of closeness and happiness, and this influenced the final outcome of Maggie’s story.

In the beginning of the novel we meet Maggie when she is still a small child, living with her parents, Mr and Mrs Tulliver, and her brother Tom. Maggie is rebellious but tender-hearted and prone to excessive feelings of guilt; she is her father’s favourite child. Tom, their mother’s favourite, is rigid and authoritarian, and not as clever as his sister. It is not possible to summarise the plot in a few lines, but it is important to know that in the last part of the book, Maggie’s father has been financially ruined and has died, and the family has lost their home. Maggie, now a young woman, falls in love with her cousin Lucy’s fiancé, Stephen; they run away together, but she leaves him the next day and returns alone. She is now in a state of utter hopelessness: she feels terribly guilty for having run away with Stephen, suffers intensely for having chosen to give him up, and from having brought shame and misery upon her family; she is now an outcast with only the bleakest future ahead. The solution George Eliot chooses to end Maggie’s story is an external catastrophe (a great Flood), which in fact brings about a disguised happy ending of the kind that appears in adolescent daydreams: it allows the guilty Maggie to die heroically – and therefore to be admired, forgiven and loved.

Many critics have pointed out that something false and idealised interrupts the truthful flow of the story. Barbara Hardy, in her illuminating essay on this novel, says about this ending (referring to the scene in the last part of the novel, when Maggie wishes she would die, and immediately realises that a great Flood is happening, as if in answer to her prayers):

What turns a great psychological novel into a Providence novel at the end is not simply this magical coincidence of prayer and answer [in ‘the water flowing under her’]; it is the appearance of exactly the wrong kind of problem solving […] The end is needed by the artist, not by the tale […]. [It is] not a discovery but an obscuring fantasy.

(Hardy 1982: 60 and 65)

Henry James said at the time:

The dénouement shocks the reader most painfully. Nothing has prepared him for it; the story does not move towards it; it casts no shadow before it.

This is not factually true, as the ending is prepared for all through the novel: in Chapter 2, where the story begins, there are two references to the possibility of Maggie drowning. George Eliot’s earliest allusion to The Mill is a sentence in her journal, on 12 January l859: ‘We went into town today and looked in the Annual Register for cases of inundation’ (quoted in Haight 1968: 302). Later, after publication, she was troubled by what she thought of as the tragedy not having been ‘adequately prepared’ and ‘developed fully’ even though she had ‘looked forward to it with much attention and premeditation from the beginning’. The problem with the ending is the unreality of the dénouement; although she had prepared it in advance, even in the text she is defensive about it. (‘Maggie’s destiny, then, is at present hidden, and we must wait for it to reveal itself like the course of an unmapped river.’ (Eliot 1979: 514)) The concluding part, that reaches its climax in the tragedy, starts from the moment Maggie meets Stephen.

Maggie’s falling in love with Stephen and running away, and then giving him up out of unbearable guilt, is, in fact, perfectly well ‘mapped’. But the final outcome is a disguised happy end coloured by George Eliot’s wish to be reconciled with her brother.²

Indeed, the very fact of Maggie’s falling in love with Stephen was much criticised at the time of publication of the novel. Numerous critics spoke of the immorality of her choice, and of the famous scene where Stephen passionately kisses Maggie’s arm. To these criticisms, she bravely answered:

If the ethics of art do not admit the truthful presentation of a character essentially noble but liable to great error – an error that is anguish to its own nobleness – then, it seems to me, the ethics of art are too narrow, and must be widened to correspond to a widening psychology.

(Letter to J. Blackwood, July 1860; in Haight 1985: 249)

But George Eliot was also much criticised for the character she created. Leslie Stephen said:

George Eliot did not herself understand what a mere hairdresser’s block she was describing in Mr. Stephen Guest. He is another instance of her incapacity for portraying the opposite sex.

(Quoted in Draper 1977: 85)

The choice of Stephen as Maggie’s lover is perfectly consistent with her psychological development and is therefore ‘right’, well ‘mapped’ for the novel. George Eliot herself would agree that Stephen is ‘a mere hairdresser’s block’; in her mocking description of him, he is:

The fine young man … whose diamond ring, attar of roses, and air of nonchalant leisure, at twelve o’clock in the day, are the graceful and odoriferous result of the largest oil-mill and the most extensive wharf in St. Ogg’s.

(Eliot 1979: 469)

Nevertheless, she conveys convincingly the strength of the sexual passion between them; but what is infinitely more important in Maggie’s choice of Stephen, or rather, in her being driven, against her conscious will, to ‘fall into temptation’ and run away with him, only to come back having destroyed her cousin’s happiness and her own, is the unconscious motivation of her passion. The tragedy at the centre of the novel is that of a young woman being taken over, momentarily, by the power of unconscious infantile passions, with destructive consequences for her future. Maggie’s acting out is psychologically consistent with her past; despite her disclaimer (see above) George Eliot has written a novel in which she shows that the tragedy in her heroine’s life is created entirely from within, and this is what makes the external catastrophe in the end so false and so disappointing. Stephen matters because he belongs to Lucy, and Lucy is the main object of Maggie’s jealousy and envy since she was a little girl.

When Tom and Maggie’s childhood friend Philip Wakem meets the grown-up Maggie for the first time, and tells her jokingly that she could take Lucy’s admirers away, Maggie feels terribly threatened, but then immediately launches into a passionate defence of dark heroines (like herself) who always lose their lovers to their blond rivals (like Lucy). She then symbolically triumphs over Lucy when she agrees to exchange her little brooch for Lucy’s large one, immediately before we – and Maggie – are introduced to Stephen. This reflects more than adolescent phantasies and rivalries: it belongs to the core of Maggie’s personality. The central problem is her troubled relationship with her mother. Mrs Tulliver does not understand, and feels threatened by, her clever little girl, who is physically and mentally so different from herself: Maggie is brown-skinned, black-haired, curious and wild; Mrs Tulliver feels it is wrong and unfair she should have such a daughter, and wishes that Lucy, the blond, pretty, well-behaved child, who looks like her, was her daughter. Maggie takes after her father, whose favourite she is. All through her childhood Maggie suffers from her mother’s rejection of her. And Tom, her beloved brother, also shows a preference for Lucy, and in fact falls in love with her when they grow up. The scene where Maggie, in a fit ofjealousy, throws Lucy in the mud, and then runs away to the gypsies, is obviously the precursor to her running away with Stephen and leaving him the next day in Mudport.

The childhood scene starts with Tom inviting Lucy to see the pond with him ‘as if there was no Maggie in existence. Seeing this Maggie lingered at a distance looking like a small Medusa with her snakes cropped’ (Eliot 1979: 160).

She then follows them:

There were passions at war in Maggie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Excerpts
• Table of Contents
• About the authors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Maggie and Dorothea: Reparation and working through in George Eliot's novels
• 2 Non vixit: A ghost story
• 3 Who's who? Notes on pathological identifications
• 4 Death by daydreaming: Madame Bovary
• 5 Psychoanalysis and literature
• 6 Imparadised in hell: Idealisation, erotisation and the return of the split-off
• 7 'For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!': On Quixotism and the golden age of pre-genital sexuality
• 8 Introduction to Iris Murdoch's Henry and Cato
• 9 Certainty and doubt: Transparency and opacity of the object
• 10 Florence and Sigmund's excellent adventure: On Oedipus and us
• 11 The wound, the bow and the shadow of the object: Notes on Freud's 'Mourning and Melancholia'
• 12 Where the lights and shadows fall: On not being able to remember and not being able to forget
• 13 'Even now, now, very now ...': On envy and the hatred of love
• 14 The 'perpetual orgy': Hysterical phantasies, bisexuality and the question of bad faith
• 15 Addiction to near-life: On pathological daydreaming and the disturbing ambiguity of faking true-love
• References
• Index