Okay everyone.
In researching Pride and Prejudice with the Marxist spin, I somehow ended up focusing on a psychoanalytical reading of Wuthering Heights.
So, I've got a ton of critical sources, as everyone knows that the characters in the book are all pretty crazy.
Looking over the core issues defined in our text, fear of abandonment, oedipal complex, fear of intimacy, and fear of betrayal are found throughout the text. The use of dreams is also very important.
(These ideas are not in any order, as I am not sure how I want to organize my paper. Either I will go through each character separately, or I will go through major core issues and terms and show examples of the characters living them. Thoughts?)
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"Death is the ultimate abandonment," (Tyson, 22).
“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you--haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” (I don't have the page number now, but this is immediately after Cathy's death)
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“Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will did it. I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong.” (no page number)
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Superego, ego, and id
Heathcliff - Id - "repressed aggressive desires...for power, for sex, for amusement, for food - without an eye for consequences" (Tyson, 25)
Edgar - Superego - "implies feeling guilty when we shouldn't, feeling guilty only when we are socially programmed (usually through the family) to feel so" (Tyson, 24)
Cathy - Ego " tries to play referee between the id and the superego
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Tyson talks on page 37 about how it isn't the primary thing looked at in psychoanalytic criticism, but "what does the work suggest about the psychological being of its author?"
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Thoughts about a thesis:
Heathcliff, Cathy, and Edgar end up buried together because they are three parts of one being?
The characters in the book are unable to form positive relationships with others because they all represent an unresolved core issue as defined by Freud.
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That's where I am now.
I love the idea of using Freud to base the structure of your paper. You have a lot of great ideas and my best suggestion is that if you wanted to include all of them ti break it down into sections this was your ideas will be cohesive and easy to follow. Hope this helps!
ReplyDeleteI think you have a good start on your thesis ! I personally think taking the major core issues approach (utilizing all the characters for each core issue of say "intimacy" or "death") is better than taking the character after character after character approach. I think this because the major core approach will allow you to mix the characters in a new pot (metaphorically speaking) per paragraph/psychological issue. So for example, if you have a superego section (for however many paragraphs it takes) you would utilize every character's illustration of their individual superegos--which you can in turn play off of each other if that makes sense to do. Hope that helps !
ReplyDeleteI think that you are both right. Thanks for the input!
ReplyDeleteCarley, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but psychoanalysis is not one of the choices for paper #2 since we have not covered it in this class. We have covered psychoanalytical reader response, but that's different. You could certainly use a psychoanalytical essay as a source, but YOUR thesis cannot be a psychoanalytical reading, since we have not studied this.
ReplyDelete