There is a rule of dream-interpretation as follows: A speech heard in a
dream always originates from a speech either heard or uttered in waking
life. Well, this rule seems followed here; the speech of Gradiva is only
a modification of a speech heard in the daytime from the zoologist.
Another rule of dream-interpretation would tell us that the substitution
of one person for another, or the mixture of two people by showing one
in a position which characterizes the other means equivalence of the two
people, a correspondence between them. Let us venture to apply this rule
also to our dream; then the interpretation would follow: “Gradiva
catches lizards, as that old gentleman does, and like him, is skilled in
lizard-catching.” This result is not comprehensible yet, but we have
another riddle before us. To which impression of the day shall we refer
the “woman colleague,” who is substituted in the dream for the famous
zoologist, Eimer? We have here fortunately not much choice; only one
other girl can be meant by “woman-colleague,” the congenial young lady
in whom Hanold has conjectured a sister travelling with her brother. “In
her gown she wore a red Sorrento rose, the sight of which, as he looked
across from his corner, stirred something in his memory without his
being able to think what it was.” This observation on the part of the
author surely gives us the right to assert that she is the
“woman-colleague” of the dream. What Hanold cannot remember is certainly
nothing but the remark of the supposed Gradiva, as she asked him for the
grave-flower, that to more fortunate girls one brought roses in spring.
In this speech, however, lay a hidden wooing. What kind of
lizard-catching is it that this more fortunate woman-colleague has been
so successful with?
On the next day Hanold surprises the supposed brother and sister in
tender embrace and can thus correct his mistake of the previous day.
They are really a couple of lovers, on their honeymoon, as we later
learn, when the two disturb, so unexpectedly, Hanold’s third meeting
with Zoë. If we will now accept the idea that Hanold, who consciously
considers them brother and sister, has, in his unconscious, recognized
at once their real relation, which on the next day betrays itself so
unequivocally, there results a good meaning for Gradiva’s remark in the
dream. The red rose then becomes a symbol for being in love; Hanold
understands that the two are as Gradiva and he are soon to be; the
lizard-catching acquires the meaning of husband-catching, and Gradiva’s
speech means something like this: “Let me arrange things; I know how to
win a husband as well as this other girl does.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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