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The Transformation of Rage
Literature and Psychoanalysis
GENERAL EDITOR: JEFFREY BERMAN
1. The Beginning of Terror: A Psychological Study of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Life and Work
DAVID KLEINBARD
2. Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women: Metaphors of Projection in the Works of Wyndham Lewis, Charles Williams, and Graham Greene
ANDREA FREUD LOEWENSTEIN
3. Literature and the Relational Self
BARBARA ANN SCHAPIRO
4. Narcissism and the Literary Libido: Rhetoric, Text, and Subjectivity
MARSHALL W. ALCORN, JR.
5. Reading Freud’s Reading
EDITED BY SANDER L. GILMAN, JUTTA BIRMELE, JAY GELLER, AND VALERIE D. GREENBERG
6. Self-Analysis in Literary Study
EDITED BY DANIEL RANCOUR-LAFERRIERE
7. The Transformation of Rage: Mourning and Creativity in George Eliot’s Fiction
PEGGY FITZHUGH JOHNSTONE
The Transformation of Rage
Mourning and Creativity in George Eliot’s Fiction
Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London
© 1994 by New York University
All rights reserved
Library of Congress-in-Publication Data
Johnstone, Peggy Fitzhugh, 1940-
The tranformation of rage : mourning and creativity in George
Eliot’s fiction / Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone.
p. cm.—(Literature and psychoanalysis ; 7)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8147-4194-0
1. Eliot, George, 1819-1880—Knowledge—Psychology. 2. Characters
and characteristics in literture. 3. Psychoanalysis and
literature. 4. Creativity in literature. 5. Emotions in
literature. 6. Grief in literature. 7. Anger in literature.
I. Title. II. Series.
PR4692.P74J64 1994
821'.8–dc20 94-12908
CIP
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For the Class of 1958 University City High School, St. Louis, Missouri
Contents
ONE Self-Disorder and Aggression in Adam Bede
TWO Narcissistic Rage in The Mill on the Floss
THREE Loss, Anxiety, and Cure: Mourning and Creativity in Silas Marner
FOUR Pathological Narcissism in Romola
FIVE Fear of the Mob in Felix Holt
six The Vast Wreck of Ambitious Ideals in Middlemarch
SEVEN The Pattern of the Myth of Narcissus in Daniel Deronda
Foreword
As New York University Press inaugurates a new series of books on literature and psychoanalysis, it seems appropriate to pause and reflect briefly upon the history of psychoanalytic literary criticism. For a century now it has struggled to define its relationship to its two contentious progenitors and come of age. After glancing at its origins, we may be in a better position to speculate on its future.
Psychoanalytic literary criticism was conceived at the precise moment in which Freud, reflecting upon his self-analysis, made a connection to two plays and thus gave us a radically new approach to reading literature. Writing to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in 1897, Freud breathlessly advanced the idea that "love of the mother and jealousy of the father" are universal phenomena of early childhood (Origins, 223–24). He referred immediately to the gripping power of Oedipus Rex and Hamlet for confirmation of, and perhaps inspiration for, his compelling perception of family drama, naming his theory the "Oedipus complex" after Sophocles' legendary fictional hero.
Freud acknowledged repeatedly his indebtedness to literature, mythology, and philosophy. There is no doubt that he was a great humanist, steeped in world literature, able to read several languages and range across disciplinary boundaries. He regarded creative writers as allies, investigating the same psychic terrain and intuiting similar human truths. "[P]sycho-analytic observation must concede priority of imaginative writers," he declared in 1901 in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (SE 6213), a concession he was generally happy to make. The only exceptions were writers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Schnitzler, whom he avoided reading because of the anxiety of influence. He quoted effortlessly from Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dostoevsky, and was himself a master prose stylist, the recipient of the coveted Goethe Prize in 1930. When he was considered for the Nobel Prize, it was not for medicine but for literature. Upon being greeted as the discoverer of the unconscious, he disclaimed the title and instead paid generous tribute to the poets