In The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung 1899), Sigmund Freud examines subconscious desires revealed by dream symbolism, in which familiar dream episodes of transgressive acts – appearing in public naked or skimpily clad among clothed onlookers, for example – are shown to be products of social repression, often stemming from infancy and the disciplines of the nursery:
The dreamer's embarrassment and the [dream] spectator’s indifference constitute a contradiction such as often occurs in dreams. It would be more in keeping with the dreamer’s feelings if the strangers were to look at him in astonishment, or were to laugh at him, or be outraged. I think, however, that this obnoxious feature has been displaced by wish-fulfilment, while the embarrassment is for some reason retained, so that the two components are not in agreement.
That these words were written in the same century in which popular authors similarly reflected this subconscious wish-fulfilling displacement in their fictive narratives surely, then, lends substance to Freud’s theories of wish-fulfilment explored in Die Traumdeutung’s Chapter III, Der Traum ist eine Wunscherfüllung :
‘. . . in colloquial language the dream is predominantly the gracious fulfiller of wishes. “I should never have imagined that in my wildest dreams,” we exclaim in delight if we find that the reality surpasses our expectations.’
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Captain John Good . . . he always wore an eye-glass in his
right eye. It seemed to grow there, for it had no string,
and he never took it out except to wipe it . . .
‘How is it, O strangers,’ asked the old man solemnly,
‘that this man (pointing to Good, who was clad in nothing but
boots and flannel shirt, and had only half finished his shaving)
grows hair on one side of his sickly face and not on the other,
and who wears one shining and transparent eye . . . ?’ |
Makers of Wildest Dreams.
And, indeed, under the spell of that wish-fulfilling dream-analogue – i.e. 19th Century fiction – those narrative passages when ‘reality surpasses our expectations’ take place for the passive reader while they repose, dream-like, within the safety of their suspension of disbelief.
In a word, Escapism.
As you have certainly noticed, it’s almost a cliché how late 19th century popular fiction seems to sublimate existential fear by its manifestation as anxiety over trivial hindrances to the rituals of domestic routine when, in a crisis, the manners and decorum of the petite bourgeoisie are assailed by perceived barbarism.
Its effect on the hearth-bound armchair reader and on the fictive protagonist is to console them with a kind of displacement activity that runs counter to their unease as participants in racy narratives that inflict greater threats of mortal jeopardy from conflicts that cannot be so lightly resolved . . . fighting Zulu warriors, say, or striving to girdle the earth in eighty days to win a wager of the longest odds . . .
May I, then, give you three examples of this literary ‘Displacement Activity Effect’ evident in a trio of popular Victorian classics of high adventure? They are works, it seems to me, characterised by the humdrum angst of finding one’s amour propre under assault in a Freudian nightmare of repression in which forbidden wishes are fulfilled in foreign lands far from civilisation’s censures.
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Toilette Interrupted . . . King Solomon’s Mines.
The symbolic components of the Quest for King Solomon’s Mines (1885) conceived by the fabulist H. Rider Haggard yield a superb case in point to illustrate how the subconscious reveals latent affinities between the writer’s chosen emblemata, which, as in dreams, are identified as the hidden interconnectedness that, for Freud, suggests that ‘. . . ideas which are apparently without connection, but which occur in immediate succession, belong to a unity which has to be deciphered . . .’
The eager reader of King Solomon’s Mines will readily perceive the marvellous interconnectedness of the potent symbols that can be identified with the novel’s ‘Sancho Panza’ figure, Captain John Good R.N., on his party’s expedition to Kukuanaland that becomes a mission to restore the rightful king of the Kukuanas:
Monocled right eye.
Half-shaven face.
Pseudo-celluloid collar made of white gutta-percha.
False teeth.
Eclipse of the Moon.
So let us examine the most significant oneiric vignettes in Good’s seemingly unpredictable adventures, semi-naked (Freud’s ‘exhibition-dreams’?), in the wildernesses of Darkest Africa to see how latent dream-content (as to Haggard’s ‘artless’ humdrum fictive images) is made manifest :
He (Captain Good, the sidekick to the quest’s leader, Sir Henry Curtis) was broad, of medium height, dark, stout, and rather a curious man to look at. He was so very neat and so very clean-shaved, and he always wore an eye-glass in his right eye. It seemed to grow there, for it had no string, and he never took it out except to wipe it . . . He put it in his trousers pocket when he went to bed, together with his false teeth, of which he had two beautiful sets . . .
‘Perfect order’ courts disaster . . .
There he [Captain Good) sat upon a leather bag, looking just as though he had come in from a comfortable day's shooting in a civilised country, absolutely clean, tidy, and well dressed. He wore a shooting suit of brown tweed, with a hat to match, and neat gaiters. As usual, he was beautifully shaved, his eye-glass and his false teeth appeared to be in perfect order, and altogether he looked the neatest man I ever had to do with in the wilderness. He even sported a collar, of which he had a supply, made of white gutta-percha . . . ‘You see, they weigh so little . . . and I always like to turn out like a gentleman.’
Half-shaven, untoothed . . .
At last he succeeded in getting the hair off the right side of his face and chin, when suddenly I, who was watching, became conscious of a flash of light [a hostile spear] that passed just by his head. Good sprang up with a profane exclamation (if it had not been a safety razor he would certainly have cut his throat) . . . ‘I see that ye are spirits,’ [the Kukuana warrior] said falteringly, ‘did ever man born of woman have hair on one side of his face and not on the other, or a round and transparent eye, or teeth which moved and melted away and grew again?’
Infantile paranoia of nakedness . . .
‘Look here, Good,’ said Sir Henry; ‘you have appeared in this country in a certain character, and you must live up to it. It will never do for you to put on trousers again. Henceforth you must exist in a flannel shirt, a pair of boots, and an eye-glass.’ . . . ‘. . . and with whiskers on one side of your face and not on the other.’
Imperial wish-fulfilment, thanks to Greenwich . . .
‘I think that I have it,’ said Good exultingly; ‘ask them to give us a moment to think.’ I did so, and the chiefs withdrew. So soon as they had gone Good went to the little box where he kept his medicines, unlocked it, and took out a note-book, in the fly-leaves of which was an almanack. ‘Now look here, you fellows, isn’t tomorrow the 4th of June?’ he said. ‘Very good; then here we have it — 4 June, total eclipse of the moon commences at 8.15 Greenwich time . . . Tell them we will darken the moon to-morrow night.’
Synthesis of component symbols . . .
Slowly the penumbra, the shadow of a shadow, crept on over the bright surface, and as it crept I heard deep gasps of fear rising from the multitude around. ‘The light of the transparent eye of him with the half-haired face shall destroy you . . . Now tell me, can any mortal man put out that moon before her hour of setting, and bring the curtain of black night down upon the land?’ . . . Now to my intense joy and relief [I] saw that we—or rather the almanack—had made no mistake. On the edge of the great orb lay a faint rim of shadow, while a smoky hue grew and gathered upon its bright surface . . . The great pale orb seemed to draw near and to grow in size. . . . ‘The moon is dying—the white wizards have killed the moon,’ yelled (the Pretender King] at last. ‘We shall all perish in the dark . . .’
The Semi-Adumbrated Face of Western Man.
In other words, another imperial miracle wrought by the ‘Children of the Stars, children of the Shining Eye and the Movable Teeth, who roar out in thunder, and slay from afar [Winchester repeating rifle].’ Nonetheless, we cannot escape the Victorian notion of Western Man as a lone explorer in the jungle’s heart of darkness who yet dresses for dinner, belches, and primly covers his mouth, though none can see or hear . . . not even Nanny. So, apparently, even in fiction devised for sports club hearties, Freud’s ‘dream-censor’ is at work, for as he observes, ‘Displacement is the principle means used in the dream-distortion to which the dream-thoughts must submit under the influence of the censorship.’
No. Under the residual strictures of the Victorian nursery, no one is permitted to go native . . . not entirely.
For, as the dream of King Solomon’s Mines seems to tell us, even when pitched into a fabulist’s nightmare of naked savagery it may be seen the soi-disant ‘civilised’ explorer is only half effaced . . . the semi-self-effacement of the symbolised dreamer.
(Curiously enough, Freud in his Interpretation of Dreams has this to say about the dream-content discoverable in a novel by Rider Haggard: ‘A strange book, but full of hidden sense . . . the eternal feminine, the immortality of our emotions—’ Such ‘dream-books’ doubtless include the following narrative, which – published 1836 — very nearly scraped in as Victorian.)
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A Wish-Fulfilling Transfiguration . . . Midshipman Easy
Let us consider next the picaresque adventures of Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836) by Captain Frederick Marryat, which in my view answers very neatly to Freud’s premise in Interpretation of Dreams . . .
We have already become acquainted with the rule of interpretation that every element of the dream may be interpreted by its opposite, as well as by itself. One can never tell at the outset whether to set down the one or the other; only the connection can decide this point. A suspicion of this state of affairs has evidently got into popular consciousness; dream books very often proceed according to the principle of contraries in their interpretation.
And Freud continues . . .
Such transformation into opposites is made possible by the intimate concatenation of associations, which in our thoughts finds the idea of a thing in that of its opposite. Like every other displacement this serves the purposes of the censor, but it is also often the work of the wish-fulfilment, for wish-fulfilment consists precisely in this substitution of an unwelcome thing by its opposite. The emotions of the dream thoughts may appear in the dream transformed into their opposites just as well as the ideas, and it is probable that this inversion of emotions is usually brought about by the dream censor.
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We have before stated how disfigured
the countenance of poor Mr Jolliffe
had been by the smallpox . . . |
An Inversion of Emotions . . . his Countenance came off like a Mask.
An innocent abroad, the young midshipman, Jack Easy, is shown his berth, and recoils from . . .
. . . Mr Jolliffe, the master’s mate, who had fixed his eye upon Jack, and to whom Jack returned the compliment. The first thing that Jack observed was, that Mr Jolliffe was very deeply pockmarked, and that he had but one eye, and that was a piercer; it appeared like a little ball of fire, and as if it reflected more light from the solitary candle than the candle gave. ‘I don’t like your looks,’ thought Jack—‘we shall never be friends.’ But here Jack fell into the common error of judging by appearances, as will be proved hereafter.
The appearance of Jolliffe is disturbing to the young midshipman . . .
[Jolliffe] had suffered martyrdom with the small-pox, which probably had contracted his lineaments: his face was not only deeply pitted, but scarred, with this cruel disorder. One eye had been lost, and all eyebrows had disappeared—and the contrast between the dull, sightless opaque orb on one side of his face, and the brilliant, piercing little ball on the other, was almost terrifying. His nose had been eaten away by the disease till it formed a sharp but irregular point: part of the muscles of the chin were contracted, and it was drawn in with unnatural seams and puckers. He was tall, gaunt, and thin, seldom smiled, and when he did, the smile produced a still further distortion. Mr Jolliffe was the son of a warrant officer. He did not contract this disease until he had been sent out to the West Indies, where it swept away hundreds.
A shipboard ammunition chest blows up and the master’s mate is saved . . .
. . . when of a sudden a tremendous explosion took place on the deck of the vessel, and bodies and fragments were hurled up in the air. Our hero went up to examine, and to assist . . . in disengaging the body from a heap of ropes and half-burned tarpaulins with which it was entangled . . . it was poor Jolliffe, whose face was burned as black as a coal by the explosion. He had also lost three fingers of the left hand, but as soon as he was brought out on the deck he appeared to recover, and pointed to his mouth for water, which was instantly procured.
Transformation into opposites . . .
Jolliffe and the wounded men were taken on board, and all of them recovered. We have before stated how disfigured the countenance of poor Mr Jolliffe had been by the smallpox—so severely was it burned that the whole of the countenance came off in three weeks like a mask, and every one declared that, seamed as it still was, Mr Jolliffe was better looking than he was before. It may be as well here to state that Mr Jolliffe not only obtained his promotion, but a pension for his wounds, and retired from the service. He was still very plain, but as it was known that he had been blown up, the loss of his eye as well as the scars on his face were all put down to the same accident, and he excited interest as a gallant and maimed officer. He married, and lived contented and happy to a good old age.
Note: For a further extract, describing Midshipman Easy’s Three-Cornered Duel, see . . .
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/11/d-r-tchekhov-textbook-case-prof.html
Grave Error of Gas Bill . . . Around the World in Eighty Days.
You know the novel. Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne (published 1873) tracks the race-against-the-clock of wealthy Londoner Phileas Fogg (he has open credit at Barings Bank), accompanied by his French valet Passepartout, as they attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days to win a £20,000 bet (i.e. valued at £2.25 million today).
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The valet Passepartout and his master
Phineas Fogg depicted by L. Benett,
Around the World in Eighty Days,
first Fully Illustrated Edition, 1873. |
Unfinished business.
Can there be any more comprehensive example of a ‘dream-book’ in which the extreme anxiety of ‘dangerous wanderings’, in Freud’s words, is displaced by a wish-fulfilling anodyne angst. In this case, the alarming realisation by the valet Passepartout that the servant has betrayed the trust of his master . . . a domestic catastrophe that will preoccupy them with a wish-fulfilling Displacement Activity, a relatively harmless neurosis to distract them from the greater fear, the unwelcome thought of failure that’s been supplanted.
Just as the train was whirling through Sydenham, Passepartout
suddenly uttered a cry of despair.
‘What's the matter?’ asked Mr. Fogg.
‘Alas! In my hurry—I—I forgot—’
‘What?’
To turn off the gas in my room!’
‘Very well, young man,’ returned Mr. Fogg, coolly, ‘it will burn—
at your expense.’
On their return to London, Fogg is in despair, believing ‘He had lost the wager!’ . . .
Knowing that Englishmen governed by a fixed idea sometimes resort
to the desperate expedient of suicide, Passepartout kept a narrow watch
upon his master, though he carefully concealed the appearance of so doing.
First of all, the worthy fellow had gone up to his room, and had
extinguished the gas burner, which had been burning for eighty days.
He had found in the letter-box a bill from the gas company, and he
thought it more than time to put a stop to this expense, which he
had been doomed to bear.
The absurd banality of finicky household budgetary details, following the exotica of Fogg’s headlong globe-trotting jaunt, contrasts strikingly with the final plight of this eccentric specimen of ‘Anglais monomanes’ in mortal danger under ‘la pression d’une idée fixe’, which, as we can see, also substitutes the fixation of a new anxiety to conveniently displace the pain of defeat . . . thus demonstrating, in the terms of Freud’s own paradox, how ‘a psychic process developing anxiety may still be a wish-fulfilment . . .’
However – these three time-honoured ‘dream-books’ apart – for an application of Freud’s ‘classical’ interpretation of psycho-sexual neuroses, coloured by the wisdom of archetypes drawn from Greek mythology, we need look no further than Jane Eyre for the last word . . . a dream-book whose publication (1847) pre-dates the Freudian era by a decade.
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Repressed passion . . . . the many faces of orphaned
Jane Eyre in her formative years from childhood though
her schooldays to adulthood make her the favourite heroine
of Eng. Lit. doctors for literary psychoanalytical studies of
ambivalent and self-denying emotional complexes. |
An Obstacle Course of Frustrated Wishes and Repressed Passion . . . Jane Eyre.
Jane Eyre is blatantly such stuff as daydreams are made of . . .
[Jane Eyre at its] core is the Oedipus situation, with Mr Rochester playing father-figure. The marriage of Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester is foiled at the very altar by the impediment which prevents every little girl from marrying her father, namely that he is married already. (Such a tiresome impediment, mama — mad, of course, and dangerously incendiary.) Mrs Q. D. Leavis [literary critic], the author of that introduction which asserts Jane Eyre’s superiority to Dickens and George Eliot, records that ‘Mr Rochester has been the object of a good deal of derision’ and grants ‘Unfortunately, unlike Jane Austen, who was immune to the vulgarization of the Romantic movement represented by Byronism, the Brontës’ daydreams had clearly been formed on Byronic lines.’ (If Mrs Leavis’s syntax is to be taken seriously, she is stating that Jane Austen was not formed on Byronic lines, but it may be safer to guess she intends to speak of Jane Austen’s daydreams.) It is more to the point, however, that Charlotte Brontë’s daydreams had clearly been formed by the Oedipal stress. The little girl can escape the guilt of her erotic relation to her father if her father is castrated : before Jane Eyre can marry her father-figure, he is mutilated in the fire that destroys his house. He loses an arm and almost all his sight — an emphatic symbolic castration, betokened twice over, by the direct loss of a limb and by the blinding that is the symbol used in the Oedipus story itself. (Mr Rochester is phallicized and castrated yet again by being likened to a tree — whose blasting by lightning forecasts, according to Mrs Leavis, his mutilation.) . . . the fire which, by maiming him, has removed the psychological impediment to their marriage, has conveniently destroyed also the legal impediment, his wife.
These words are from the excoriating Fifty Works of English Literature we could do without, which displays the unsheathed claws of Brigid Brophy’s feline wit to full advantage (this 1967 demolition job on English and American classics has contributions from BB and Michael Levey and Charles Osborne). I assume this passage is by BB as it seems characteristic of her insights but, please note, all fifty hatchet jobs have no byelines.
For my appreciation of the enviable wit of Brigid Brophy, see:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html
