English, Department of
Date of this Version
2009
Document Type
Article
Citation
George Eliot Review 40 (Special Issue, 2009)
Abstract
George Eliot tentatively reflected in her journal that she might be touching the hearts of her fellow men in Scenes aj Clerical Life. In this short paper, I explore with the aid of Kleinian psychoanalytical ideas what might be involved in such a touching of the heart and attempt in the process to indicate that, despite their evident flaws, the Scenes are powerful harbingers of the later and mature works.
I have elsewhere detailed my argument that a literary text will evoke a strong emotional response in the reader in those cases where the powerful and contradictory sensations of the unconscious, of early unconscious phantasy, are at some level apprehended through the text by the reader. The text may have both a manifest and a latent level, as in a dream, where the manifest level is the story or narrative of the latent level - the same story read very differently through the agency of what Freud described as 'dreamwork'. Such a 'psychoanalytic aesthetic' is I suggest what distinguishes a creative literary text from a text of fleeting sensation, perhaps the 'silly novel' of which George Eliot disapproved. I hope to interest you, therefore, in the idea that the psychoanalytic insights of Melanie Klein (who is relatively neglected in literary theory) are helpful in understanding why what may be thought of as the latent level of a creative literary text has the power to 'touch the heart'.
Included in
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Comments
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