DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

'Acting Out' in Daniel Deronda

Authors

Toni Griffiths

Date of this Version

2008

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 39 (2008)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

This short paper illustrates the way in which psychoanalytic perspectives can help us to understand the effect which a complex literary text like Daniel Deronda has on the reader. The two psychoanalytic perspectives used are Freud's insights into the way dreams work, and Melanie Klein's exploration of the nature and importance of the unconscious phantasies of very early childhood and her discovery of the early developmental 'positions'. 1 These insights help to explain how what may appear puzzling and difficult in a novel nevertheless holds and moves its readers.

Freud's insights into the meaning and form of dreams2 suggest that they operate at the same time on two levels: the 'story' of the dream, and the underlying dream-thoughts. The underlying dream-thoughts derive from unconscious feelings of great strength based often on the earliest impressions of childhood. They are turned by a process that Freud called 'dreamwork' into the surface story of the dream. The underlying dream-thoughts are suggested most strongly at the places where they disrupt the surface story. Freud observed nodal points and symptomatic places characterized, for instance, by distortion, ambiguity or absence in the surface story, and condensation, displacement and 'secondary revision'. So a dream has both a 'manifest text', the story of the dream as the dreamer might recount it on waking up, and a 'latent text' containing the underlying dream-thoughts. These two texts are not different stories; they are the same story read in different ways.

These characteristics of dreamwork may also be seen as characteristics of a kind of literary dreamwork. As in a dream, the condensation of latent thoughts, memories and phantasies can be seen in textual strategies, key words, nodal places, symbolization, absences. Looking at these points in the narrative as instances of 'literary dreamwork' can reveal a 'latent text' beneath the 'manifest text' of Daniel Deronda and can illuminate the text at work on the reader in ways of which neither the author nor the reader may generally be aware.

The textual narrative may in this way be seen to be at work in relation to its own 'latent text' in a way analogous to how the surface content of a dream relates to underlying dream thoughts. George Eliot's novels in this sense provide what Wilfrid Bion thought of as a 'container,3 of inner experience, the intensity of which might otherwise be unbearable. 'We should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence',4 wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch.