Imagined Human Beings

A Psychological Approach to Character and Conflict in Literature

Bernard Jay Paris

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780814768853
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

One of literature's greatest gifts is its portrayal of realistically drawn characters--human beings in whom we can recognize motivations and emotions. In Imagined Human Beings, Bernard J. Paris explores the inner conflicts of some of literature's most famous characters, using Karen Horney's psychoanalytic theories to understand the behavior of these characters as we would the behavior of real people.

When realistically drawn characters are understood in psychological terms, they tend to escape their roles in the plot and thus subvert the view of them advanced by the author. A Horneyan approach both alerts us to conflicts between plot and characterization, rhetoric and mimesis, and helps us understand the forces in the author's personalty that generate them. The Horneyan model can make sense of thematic inconsistencies by seeing them as the product of the author's inner divisions. Paris uses this approach to explore a wide range of texts, including Antigone, "The Clerk's Tale," The Merchant of Venice, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, The Awakening, and The End of the Road.

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Applications of a Horneyan Approach

It is not difficult to see why psychoanalytic theory has been widely used in the study of literature. Psychoanalysis deals with human beings in conflict with themselves and each other, and literature portrays and is written and read by such people. What is confusing is that there are so many psychoanalytic theories, each with its claims and proponents. It clearly makes sense to use psychoanalysis in literary study, but which theory should we employ?

I do not believe that literature should be placed on the Procrustean bed of any one theory. Human psychology is inordinately complex and can be approached in many ways. A number of theories have accurately described certain aspects of it, but none has the whole truth or is universally applicable. Many theorists have derived global models of human nature from the limited range of phenomena they understand well, or have tried to explain too much with too limited a repertory of motives. We need a wide range of theories to do justice to the richness and diversity of human experience and to the literature that expresses it. Some theories are highly congruent with certain works and some with others, and often several can be employed in studying the same text or aspect of literature. There is a large body of Freudian and Jungian criticism; and the ideas of Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, R. D. Laing, Fritz Perls, Heinz Kohut, Jacques Lacan, and others have also been profitably used in literary studies.

Another psychoanalyst with an important contribution to make is Karen Horney. Her theory fits numerous works from a wide range of periods and cultures and illuminates a variety of literary issues. It yields a distinctive set of insights and is a valuable critical tool.

When I first read Horney in 1959, at the suggestion of a colleague in psychology, I was deeply impressed by her theory. She not only described my behavior in an immediately recognizable way, but she seemed to have invaded my privacy and to have understood my insecurities, inner conflicts, and unrealistic demands on myself. Above all, she enabled me to comprehend a mysterious change that had taken place in me since the completion of my dissertation.

I was originally a specialist in Victorian fiction who was trained at Johns Hopkins in the explication of texts and the history of ideas. In my doctoral dissertation, I examined George Eliot’s thought in relation to her time and her novels in relation to her ideas. While I was working on my dissertation, I felt that George Eliot had discovered the answer to the modern quest for values, and I expounded her Religion of Humanity with a proselytizing zeal. When I completed the dissertation, I found that although I still felt my reading of George Eliot to be accurate, I was no longer enthralled by her ideas. I could not understand my loss of enthusiasm, which had left me feeling painfully disoriented and uncertain about my beliefs.

Reading Karen Horney helped me to understand what had happened. Horney correlates belief systems with strategies of defense and observes that when our defenses change, so does our philosophy of life. I had had great difficulty writing my dissertation, for reasons that therapy later made clear, and had frequently felt hopeless about completing the Ph.D. Faced with the frustration of my academic ambitions, I found George Eliot’s Religion of Humanity to be exactly what I needed: we give meaning to our lives by living for others rather than for ourselves. But when I finished my dissertation and was told that it ought to be published (Paris 1965), I could once again dream of a glorious career. Since I no longer needed to live for others in order to give meaning to my life, George Eliot’s philosophy lost its appeal. In Horneyan terms, my inability to write my dissertation forced me to abandon my expansive ambitions and to become self-effacing, but on triumphantly completing it, I became expansive once more, and George Eliot’s ideas left me cold. This was an unconscious process of which I first became aware through my reading of Horney and that I understood more fully in the course of psychotherapy.

While in therapy in the early 1960s, I read a great deal of psychoanalytic theory, often using it as an aid to self-analysis. I did not connect it to the study of literature until one memorable day in 1964 when I was teaching Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Again it was Horney who helped me to understand what was mystifying me. While arguing that the novel is full of contradictions and does not make sense thematically, I suddenly remembered Horney’s statement that “inconsistencies are as definite an indication of the presence of conflicts as a rise in body temperature is of physical disturbance” (1945, 35). In the next instant I realized that the novel’s contradictions become intelligible if we see them as part of a system of inner conflicts. I have been unfolding the implications of that “aha” experience ever since, with profound effects on my view of literature.

As we shall see when examining The Awakening, there are other works like Vanity Fair in which thematic contradictions make it impossible to understand the text in its own terms. Literary critics have often defended the artistic unity of such works by suppressing awareness of inconsistencies or by rationalizing contradictions as part of a controlled structure of tension, irony, and paradox. More recently they have tended to delight in contradictions as evidence of the tendency of all linguistic structures to deconstruct themselves. With the help of Horney’s theory we are often able both to recognize inconsistencies as genuine problems and to understand them as parts of an intelligible structure of psychological conflict. Long before the advent of deconstruction, I was showing how literary works almost always contain elements that subvert their dominant themes, but after this deconstructive move I was able to reconstruct them by showing that they still make sense in psychological terms (Paris 1974; see de Beaugrande 1986).

After accounting for the thematic contradictions of Vanity Fair as part of a structure of inner conflicts, I realized that Horney also works well with the major characters in the novel—William Dobbin, Amelia Sedley, and Becky Sharp. As I taught other nineteenth-century novels with Horney in mind, I came to see that they, too, contain highly individualized characters whose motivational systems can be understood with the help of her theory. This recognition eventually led to my first book using Horney—A Psychological Approach to Fiction: Studies in Thackeray, Stendhal, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Conrad (1974). Characterization was not my only concern, but I gave a large part of each chapter to a detailed analysis of major figures in Vanity Fair, The Red and the Black, The Mill on the Floss, Notes from Underground, and Lord Jim. In subsequent books, I have taken a Horneyan approach to all of Jane Austen’s and all of Shakespeare’s major characters (Paris 1978b, 1991a, 1991b). The fact that Horney works well with literature from a wide variety of periods and cultures tells us something about both the power of her theory and the enduring features of human behavior.¹

Like most students of literature, I had been taught to analyze literary characters primarily in formal and thematic terms. When I looked at realistically drawn characters from a Horneyan perspective, I came to see that there was an immense amount of psychological detail that literary criticism had simply ignored. These characters were not simply functions in a text or encoded messages from the author but were imagined human beings whose thoughts, feelings, and actions made sense in motivational terms. I had not been taught that literature is about human beings, human relationships, and human experiences; but outside of the academy one of the primary appeals of great literature has always been its portrayal of characters who seem to be of the same nature as ourselves. A psychological understanding of these characters makes them all the more fascinating.

When I began discussing the psychology of literary characters, I quickly encountered a great deal of resistance to this procedure among my fellow critics. It has become a dogma of modern theory that literary characters do not belong to the real world in which people have internal motivations but to a fictional world in which everything they are and do is part of a larger structure whose logic is determined by purely artistic considerations. The most recent schools of criticism continue to see characters in primarily functional terms, with many of them attacking the whole concept of a self that can be represented.

I believe that the rejection of the idea that literary characters can be analyzed in ways similar to those in which we analyze real people has been an enormous critical error (for fuller accounts of my argument, see Paris 1974 and 1991b). The objections to this procedure apply to some kinds of characters but not to others. It is essential to recognize that there are different types of characterization requiring different strategies of interpretation.

A useful taxonomy is that of Scholes and Kellogg (1966), which distinguishes between aesthetic, illustrative, and mimetic characterization. Aesthetic characters are stock types who may be understood primarily in terms of their technical functions and their formal and dramatic effects. Illustrative characters are “concepts in anthropoid shape or fragments of the human psyche parading as whole human beings.” We try to understand “the principle they illustrate through their actions in a narrative framework” (88). Behind realistic literature there is a strong “psychological impulse” that “tends toward the presentation of highly individualized figures who resist abstraction and generalization” (101). When we encounter a fully drawn mimetic character, “we are justified in asking questions about his motivations based on our knowledge of the ways in which real people are motivated” (87). A mimetic character usually has aesthetic and illustrative functions, but numerous details have been called forth by the author’s desire to make the character lifelike, complex, and inwardly intelligible, and these will go unnoticed if we interpret the character only in functional terms.

One of the most frequent objections to motivational analysis is that it takes characters out of the work and tries to understand them in their own right. Given the nature of mimetic characterization, this is not an unreasonable procedure. Mimetic characters are part of the fictional world in which they exist, but they are also autonomous beings with an inner logic of their own. They are, in E. M. Forster’s phrase, “creations inside a creation” (1927, 64) who tend to go their own way as the author becomes absorbed in imagining human beings, motivating their behavior, and supplying their reactions to the situations in which they have been placed.

There has been a great deal of resistance among critics not only to regarding literary characters as imagined human beings, but also to using modern psychoanalytic theories to analyze them. One objection has been that earlier authors could not possibly have conceived of their characters in the terms we are using to talk about them. My reply to this is that the authors had to make sense of human behavior for themselves, as we all do, and that they drew upon the conceptual systems of their day. To see their characters in terms of those systems is to recover what may have been the authors’ conscious understanding of them, but that does not do justice to their mimetic achievement or make the characters intelligible to us. To interpret Hamlet in terms of humors psychology does not explain his behavior to me.

We cannot identify our authors’ conceptions of their characters with the characters they have actually created, even if we could be certain of what their conceptions were. One of the features of mimetic characters is that they have a life independent of their creators and that our understanding of them will change, along with our changing conceptions of human behavior. Even though the characters will outlive every interpretation, each age has to make sense of them for itself, using its own modes of explanation. Any theory we use will be culture-bound and reductive; still, we must use some theory, consciously or not, to satisfy our appetite for conceptual understanding.

I believe that psychoanalytic theory has much to contribute to our understanding of literature and that it permits a conceptual clarity that cannot be derived from literature alone. But literature has a contribution of at least equal importance to make to the theories that help us to understand it. There is a reciprocal relation, I propose, between psychoanalytic theory and the literary presentation of the phenomena it describes. Theory provides categories of understanding that help us to recover the intuitions of the great writers about the workings of the human psyche, and these intuitions, once recovered, become part of our conceptual understanding of life. We gain greater insight into human behavior because of the richness of artistic presentation. Even the most sophisticated theories are thin compared to the complex portrayals of characters and relationships that we find in literary masterpieces, and they are thinner yet, of course, when compared with the density of life. While discussing an aspect of vindictiveness in Neurosis and Human Growth, Karen Horney observed that “great writers have intuitively grasped [this phenomenon] and have presented it in more impressive forms than a psychiatrist can hope to do” (198). Taken together psychoanalytic theory and literature give us a fuller grasp of human experience than either provides by itself.

The analyst and the artist often deal with the same phenomena, but in significantly different ways. Psychoanalytic theory gives us formulations about human behavior, whereas literature gives us truth to experience. Because of its concrete, dramatic quality, literature enables us not only to observe people other than ourselves but also to enter into their mental universe, to discover what it feels like to be these people and to confront their life situations. We can gain in this way a phenomenological grasp of experience that cannot be derived from theory alone, and not from case histories either, unless they are also works of art. Because literature provides this kind of knowledge, it has a potentially sensitizing effect, one that is of as much importance to the clinician as it is to the humanist. Literature offers us an opportunity to amplify our experience in a way that can enhance our empathic powers, and because of this it is a valuable aid to clinical training and personal growth.

Another major source of resistance to the psychoanalytic study of character has been its reliance on infantile experience to account for the behavior of the adult. Since literature usually provides little information about early childhood, psychoanalytic critics tend to infer early experience from adult behavior, which they then account for in terms of infantile origins. Crucial explanatory material is generated out of the premises of their theory, with no corroborating literary evidence except the supposed results of the invented experiences, which were inferred from these results to begin with.

A Horneyan approach is not subject to this difficulty. Although Horney, like Freud, sees psychological problems as originating in early childhood, she does not see the adult as simply repeating earlier patterns, and she does not explain adult behavior through analogies with childhood experience. Once a child begins to adopt defensive strategies, his or her particular system develops under the influence of external factors, which encourage some strategies and discourage others, and of internal necessities, whereby each defensive move requires others in order to maintain its viability. The character structure of the adult has its origins in early childhood, but it is also the product of a complicated evolutionary history, and it can be understood in terms of the present constellation of defenses. Such a synchronic or structural approach is highly suitable for the analysis of literary characters, since we are often supplied with ample information about their existing defenses, however sketchy their childhoods may be. Because it describes the kinds of phenomena that are actually portrayed in literature, it permits us to stick to the words on the page, to explicate the text.

As I have continued to look at literature from a Horneyan perspective, one discovery has led to another, about both the nature of literature and the possible applications of the approach. I began by using the theory to make sense of thematic contradictions but soon came to appreciate its power to illuminate character. Recognizing the psychological complexity of many of the protagonists of nineteenth-century fiction led me to change my ideas about characterization; and as I read and taught works from a variety of periods and national literatures, I found that mimetic characterization is more widespread than generally thought and that Horney’s theory works well with writers from many cultures. My selection of texts in part 2 of this book is designed to show, among other things, that a Horneyan approach is applicable to works from Antigone to The End of the Road.

Employing a Horneyan approach to character has led me to perceive that the great mimetic creations almost always subvert their aesthetic and thematic functions. As we have seen, E. M. Forster describes “round” characters as “creations inside a creation.” They “arrive when evoked,” he says, “but full of the spirit of mutiny. For they have these numerous parallels with people like ourselves, they try to live their own lives and are consequently engaged in treason against the main scheme of the book” (1927, 64). That seems exactly right to me. As wholes in themselves, imagined human beings can be understood in terms of their inner motivational systems, and when they are so understood, they appear to be inharmonious toward the larger whole of which they are a part. They are in conflict with their roles in the plot and with the author’s rhetorical treatment of their experience.

When I first became aware of the incongruities between form and theme on the one hand and mimesis on the other, I felt that they were failures of art, but I have found them to be almost inescapable in realistic literature and have come to regard them as a concomitant of great characterization. Round characters create a dilemma for their creators. If they “are given complete freedom,” says Forster, “they kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they revenge themselves by dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay” (1927, 64). The artists’ character-creating impulses work against their efforts to shape and interpret experience, and they must choose between allowing their characters to come alive and kick the book to pieces or killing their characters by subordinating them to the main scheme of the work. The great realists choose fidelity to their psychological intuitions over the demands of theme and form, usually without knowing that they are doing so.

There are a number of reasons why realistic characterization is almost bound to subvert a work’s formal and thematic structures. As Northrop Frye observes, there are “two poles of literature,” the mimetic, with its “tendency to verisimilitude and accuracy of description,” and the mythic, with its “tendency to tell a story . . . about characters who can do anything” (1957, 51). Western literature has moved steadily from the mythic to the mimetic pole, but the movement toward mimesis has affected only content; literary form is derived from mythic patterns. Thus even in the most realistic works, “we see the same structural principles” that we find in their pure form in myth (136). There is a built-in conflict between myth and mimesis: “the realistic writer soon finds that the requirements of literary form and plausible content always fight against each other” (Frye 1963, 36).

Literary form and realistic characterization involve incompatible canons of decorum and universes of discourse. Realistic characterization aims at verisimilitude; it follows the logic of motivation, of probability, of cause and effect. But, as Frye observes, when judged by the canons of probability, “every inherited convention of plot in literature is more or less mad” (1963, 36). Form and mimesis arouse different sets of expectations within the reader. Mimetic characters create an appetite for a consistently realistic world. We want their behavior to make sense and their fates to be commensu...