Erotic literature -- History and criticism; Psychoanalysis and literature; Sex in literature
"O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and
women, nor the likes of the parts of you;
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of
the soul and that they are the soul.
I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and
that they are my poems...."
Where Whitman shows sublimations of these infantile phases he deduces
important and profound views of life to make us happier. He questions
whether the giving up of some of the heritages we surrendered to
cultural demands has not made us also part with some valuable emotions
and whether we have not denied ourselves rights we ought to resume. He
makes egoism respectable, and deduces individualism from it.
V
I also wish to mention that sexual aberration, in which an object unfit
for the sexual aim is substituted for the normal one, and is known as
fetichism. We need not go into the causes of it, but psychoanalysis
has shown that smell plays a part. We often find poets celebrating
the eyebrows, the gloves, and other objects connected with the women
they love. Though a certain amount of fetichism is normal in love,
literature gives us instances where it amounts to an aberrated passion
in the author. There is much fetichism in Gautier's stories, where he
dwells on the fetichistic characteristics of his heroes in whom he
describes himself. Then those poems where the sparrows and dogs of the
beloved are described as if the author were in love with them because
of their associations, those tales where too much attention is given to
the dress of the heroines, all have fetichistic traces.
A phase of sex life in the child that is significant for the future
is the sublimation that occurs in the sexual latency period between
the third and fifth year, when the sentiments of shame, loathing
and morality appear. These are reaction formations to the perverse
tendencies of infancy. They are brought about at the cost of the
infantile sexuality itself. These sublimations take place in the
beginning in this latency period, and if they do not occur there is
an abnormal development and the result is the latter perversions of
life. When we say a man has no moral sense, we mean not only that he
does not know the difference between right and wrong but that he is not
disgusted or shamed at sexual conduct that is held in abhorrence by
most people. Hence those authors who have this indifference to perverse
moral conduct in their work, never as children in the latency period
developed shame or disgust. All this is again evidence of the influence
of the sublimations in childhood upon later literary work and view
points. Girls as a rule develop this sense of morality earlier than
boys, and this no doubt accounts to some extent for the prudishness of
most women writers. The development is greater and we therefore find no
women Rabelais in literature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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