Erotic literature -- History and criticism; Psychoanalysis and literature; Sex in literature
In compulsion or obsessional neuroses we also have unconscious
sexual factors at work since infancy, but the effect of the painful
idea affixes itself to other ideas, producing obsessions. These are
transformed reproaches which have escaped the repression. Morbid fears,
doubts and temptations are the result.
The most common form of neuroses in life, and hence most described in
literature, is anxiety hysteria. They partake of the nature of hysteria
and the true neurosis, anxiety. "In these cases," says Dr. Hitschman,
"the anxiety arises not only from somatic (physical) causes, but from
a part of the ungratified libido which embraces unconscious complexes
and through the repression of these gives rise to neurotic anxiety."
The excitation is psychic as well as physical.
Literature abounds then chiefly in the psychoneuroses and especially
anxiety neurosis.
All literature where the author is recalling old griefs on which he
still broods, looking upon them as if they had happened yesterday,
are related to hysteria. Incessant complaints about early love
disappointments, recalling all the incidents, constant memories of
the mother and of childhood days, and obstinate clinging to ideas and
pictures that were uppermost in early life, are related to hysteria.
Byron and Heine, harking back all the time to their early love woes,
were really sufferers from hysteria. Lady Macbeth, as Dr. Coriat has
shown, was a victim of hysteria.
We see obsessions at work in characters like Ibsen's Brand who aims at
all or nothing.
We find most troubles described in literature related to anxiety
hysteria, from the childish griefs of David Copperfield, Maggie
Tulliver and Jane Eyre, to the sad love experiences of the characters
of Thomas Hardy.
Literature is largely a record of the anxieties and hysterias of
humanity.
II
Byron is a good example of hysteria in literature. He loved Mary
Chaworth, and for nineteen years, from 1805, the date of her marriage,
to his death in 1824, she figured in nearly all his shorter love poems.
She was Astarte in _Manfred_. She is Lady Adeline in _Don Juan_, she
is, no doubt, "Thyrza"; she figured as the heroines of his eastern
tales.
In the poem, "The Dream," he refers to the irony of fate that married
each of them unhappily, and he describes his grief because he never wed
her. When the poem was published her husband was annoyed and cut down
some trees to which reference was made in the poem,--"the diadem of
trees" arranged in a circle.
There are nearly fifty lyrics in which she appears beyond doubt, not
mentioning the bigger poems where she often is present.
The last lines that Byron wrote in 1824, "I watched thee when the foe
was at my side," refer to her:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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