Oedipal and Electra Complexes
In Rebecca female sexuality is explored through the heroine’s symbolic development of a negative Oedipal complex followed by an Electra complex. Although avoidance of incest was believed by Freud to be the impetus for normal sexual development, the film explores the abnormal outcome of a negative Oedipal/Electra complex, i.e. replacement of the mother by the daughter as the father’s heterosexual love interest. The heroine is torn between her desire to merge with Rebecca and to separate from her due to this combination of negative Oedipal and Electra complexes. The key difference between these two complexes underlies the heroine’s development.
The difference between a negative Oedipal and Electra complex is not subtle. A negative Oedipal complex involves love for the mother in the form of Freud’s “bisexual attraction”. The girl will desire and identify with her, wishing to emulate her. An Electra complex is defined by the girl’s imagined rivalry between mother and daughter for the father’s love. For Freud the heterosexual development of little girls is more difficult to explain compared to that of little boys because the girl must change the object of her love from woman to man. Initially the girl has a negative Oedipal complex until some catalytic occurrence shifts her into an Electra complex marked by dislike of the mother and rivalry. In a normal Freudian non-incestuous relationship the girl will transfer love of the father to other men and will not stop loving the mother entirely. In an incestuous relationship the girl will eliminate the threat of the mother, take her place, and engage in a sexual relationship with the father. Avoiding this, Freud believes, drives the female sexual development. Embracing this, Hitchcock displays, drives the unheimlich development of Rebecca.
Symbolically in the film, the main characters take on the roles of key players in Freud’s development strategies. The lovely heroine is clearly the girl, very young relative to Maxim and for the first half of the film innocent, weak, and small. She is made smaller by the overpowering presence of Rebecca, who for her typifies the perfect female. Maxim is clearly the father figure due to his age relative to the heroine and his relationship with her. His comments about her being a child, his desire for her never to grow up or wear ...
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...e destruction of Mandalay and the death of Danvers, her last true worshiper. The last scene shows Maxim and the heroine embracing, insinuating that they go on to a heterosexual, symbolically incestuous relationship that is not overshadowed by Rebecca.
In short the heroine’s development in the film from a naive, weak little girl into a powerful, knowledgeable wife is mirrored by this symbolic transition from a negative Oedipal stage to an Electra stage to a father-daughter incestuous relationship. The heroine’s actions are not given explicit justification in the film, but the typical behavior of Freud’s proverbial girl matches her behavior perfectly. The heroine tries to become like the woman who she believes Maxim loves, fails, and tries then to compete with her. The twist on the Oedipal/Electra complex comes about when the girl’s feminine rivalry turns to aligned opposition with the father against the mother leading to an incestuous relationship, precisely the outcome Freud’s theory sought to avoid. Because the film’s development of the heroine diverges from normal sexual development in this way, Rebecca’s development attains Hitchcock’s sought after unheimlich effect.
Jay Gatsby is the main character in The Great Gatsby. He is the mysterious character that the story revolves around. Nick is his neighbor that gets invited to Gatsby’s party that set in on Gatsby being a mysterious person that has so many people talking about him and talking about different stories about Gatsby that unravel how big of a mystery Gatsby is. In The Great Gatsby, “Gatsby’s notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news” (Fitzgerald 105). In chapter six, the real truth is revealed about the great Gatsby. The stories of the mysterious Gatsby in the parties were not true. The stories about Gatsby also went around New York, which made Nick ask Gatsby about his past ("The Great Gatsby," Fitzgerald). Nick also asked about Gatsby’s past hoping Nick would finally hear the truth. According to The Great Gatsby, “This was the night, Carraway says, that Gatsby told him the story (its factual details have been told earlier in the novel) of his early life. The purpose of the telling here is not to reveal facts but to try to understand the character of Gatsby’s passion. The final understanding is reserved for one of those precisely right uttera...
Kleist begins his delineation of the Marquise with terms such as "widowed,", "a lady," and "the mother of several well-brought-up children" (Kleist 68). In this introduction the reader learns that the Marquise has experienced both marriage and childbirth. In respect to her deceased husband, the Marquise avoids remarriage and returns to her family's home with her parents, brother and children. The Marquise transforms her role as lover and wife to daughter and mother, therefore stifling an aspect of her womanhood. It is not until she is unknowingly sexually assaulted and made pregnant that her femininity is reborn.
Dozier, Richard. "Adultry and Disappointment in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?" Modern Drama Vol11. No 4, (Feb 1969): 432-436.
When looking at Jay Gatsby, one sees many different personalities and ideals. There is the gracious host, the ruthless bootlegger, the hopeless romantic, and beneath it all, there is James Gatz of North Dakota. The many faces of Gatsby make a reader question whether they truly know Gatsby as a person. Many people question what exactly made Jay Gatsby so “great.” These different personas, when viewed separately, are quite unremarkable in their own ways. When you take them together, however, you discover the complicated and unique individual that is Jay Gatsby.
Finally, even though, for a long time, the roles of woman in a relationship have been established to be what I already explained, we see that these two protagonists broke that conception and established new ways of behaving in them. One did it by having an affair with another man and expressing freely her sexuality and the other by breaking free from the prison her marriage represented and discovering her true self. The idea that unites the both is that, in their own way, they defied many beliefs and started a new way of thinking and a new perception of life, love and relationships.
A main theme throughout the movie is freedom. All three women actively seek it and at the movie's end each woman chooses what she thinks is best: Woolf drowns herself, Brown leaves her family and Vaughan finally lets go of her longtime friend and past lover, Richard. Each woman's decision, fueled by the circumstances which surround her, is reached after much thought and deliberation. Woolf s concern is Leonard's sanity and happiness. She realizes the great pressure she puts on him and sees her suicide as a way of freeing him from being responsible for ...
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a tragic tale of love distorted by obsession. Finding himself in the city of New York, Jay Gatsby is a loyal and devoted man who is willing to cross oceans and build mansions for his one true love. His belief in realistic ideals and his perseverance greatly influence all the decisions he makes and ultimately direct the course of his life. Gatsby has made a total commitment to a dream, and he does not realize that his dream is hollow. Although his intentions are true, he sometimes has a crude way of getting his point across. When he makes his ideals heard, his actions are wasted on a thoughtless and shallow society. Jay Gatsby effectively embodies a romantic idealism that is sustained and destroyed by the intensity of his own dream. It is also Gatsby’s ideals that blind him to reality.
The Phallic Stage =) the child learn to differentiate between the male and the female gender and becomes aware of sexuality. He clarified during that stage a child experience the Oedipus complex, meaning that young boys have very strong feelings toward their mother and as a result, they developed jealousy toward their father. They feeling can be so strong that they want to kill their father. The Elektra complex which reveals girl attraction for the father will result in a feeling of distaste for toward their mother.
Since his article, “Allure, Authority and Psychoanalysis” discusses the meaning behind everything that happens in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” we can also examine “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” in the same manner. “Allure, Authority, and Psychoanalysis” discusses the unconscious wishes, effects, conflicts, anxieties, and fantasies within “Frankenstein.” The absence of strong female characters in “Frankenstein” suggests the idea of Victor’s desire to create life without the female. This desire possibly stems from Victor’s attempt to compensate for the lack of a penis or, similarly, from the fear of female sexuality. Victor’s strong desire for maternal love is transferred to Elizabeth, the orphan taken into the Frankenstein family.
In The Great Gatsby, many individuals are involved in a struggle to find themselves and who they want to be. Personal identity is a very challenging thing to define. Everyone has an image in their mind of who they want to be. These images are usually very different from the actual identity of a person. In this novel, Jay Gatsby’s search or struggle for a new identity for himself is an ongoing journey. He has dedicated his entire life creating an image to impress Daisy Buchanan and to set himself into her society. This image does not necessarily depict who he is in reality.
(Freud, 1905) Berie is stuck in the phallic stage due to her abnormal family set-up/unusual relationship with both her mother and father. When stuck in this phase, Freud says that the adult personality can contain the following traits: vanity, sexual anxiety, inadequacy, and inferiority. Even as a fifteen year old, Berie exhibited all of the possible traits, which were later exaggerated when her own husband treated her the same way that her emotionally-vacant father did. During her teenage summer, Berie felt like she was not as desirable as the other girls, and often hid in the corners of bars as the other girls danced the night away. Berie was ignored at home, around friends, at work, and most importantly by her best friend Sils, whenever there was a boy around. "The words "developed" and "undeveloped" filled me with dread and loathing," (Moore, 1994, 13) Placing worth in how others viewed her body, Berie spent many years feeling inferior to everyone around her; this timidness followed her through her adult life, permeating every area, including her
This paper explores Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual developmental theory. The articles, however, vary in their personal views of Freud’s model as it can be found as controversial. Freud’s ideas are highly influenced by personality, behavior, and developmental stages. This paper also examines the unconscious and conscious mind. Freud concluded that the mind is heavily influenced by the unconscious mind rather than consciousness. Stages from infancy to adulthood will also be examined.
Psychoanalytic Theory itself has, what seems to be, two contradictory halves: Freudian psychoanalysis and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The first half focuses solely on the author and the unconscious mind; the second considers the unconscious, but prefers to concentrate on outside influences by deconstructing the text itself. According to Freud, interpretation is achieved by examining conflicts and symbols, such as Freudian slips and dream images. These outlets are help to determine whether an individual’s external behavior coincides (or conflicts) with their internal emotion. Freud placed emphasis on sexuality and the Oedipus complex, which is the idea of repressed sexual feelings toward a parent of opposite sex. He also defined three levels of the subconscious mind: the ego, the super-ego, and the id. Barry explains that the stages align with “the consciousness, the conscience, and the unconscious” respectively (93). On the other hand, Lacan, a follower of Freud, concentrated on the relationship between an author and his or her work. He claimed the two were inexorably connected, that objectivity is nonexistent. In an essence: an author’s personality is used to interpret the text and, in contrast, the text is used to gain insight about the author. Regardless of the emphasis, psychoanalytic criticism engages an
The term Electra complex which according to Freud is ‘feminine Oedipus attitude’ is for the first time coined by C. G. Jung as ‘Electra complex’. This term refers to “a type of arrested development in an older female child or woman, in which the daughter adulates the father and scorns the mother” (Swiontkowski 31) for she lacks a penis which is a phallus, a symbol of power and authority. While Freud sees the complex from anatomical and sexual point of view, Jung sees it from symbolic point of view where biological father is often absent. If we read the poems identified with the Electra complex written by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, we will notice that both the poets represent an imaginary image of the fathers to symbolize patriarchal power what they want to gain not to see their position as victim in the patriarchal social structure any more. Gale Swiontkowski clearly points out why a daughter shows her excessive psychological attachment towards her father and denying her mother. She
...acques Lacan, a famous psychoanalyst of the twentieth century who is sometimes referred to as the “French Freud.” Complex in both his writing and treatment of psychoanalysis, Lacan is perhaps one of the greatest heirs to Freud’s ideas concerning the unconscious in modern theory. He is best recognized for his division of the psyche into three distinct orders: the “Symbolic,” the “Imaginary,” and the “real.” However, he is often compared to Freud with regards to his interpretation of the Oedipus complex, which he reforms into what he calls the “oedipal dialectic,” a series of three stages by which a child achieves sexual normalization. Although the resolution is identical to that of Freud’s Oedipal complex, critics like Mikkael Borch-Jacobsen and Douglas Brick argue that Lacan’s model of infantile sexual development differs from Freud’s model at two distinct points.