Erotic literature -- History and criticism; Psychoanalysis and literature; Sex in literature
"When we came in by Glasgow town
We were a comely sight to see;
My love was clad in the black velvet
And I myself in cramasie."
She does not want to dress herself gorgeously now as she has no lover.
Among other great love wails by a woman are the old Saxon elegy "A
Woman's Complaint" and the second Idyl of Theocritus.
All the pain of frustrated love is due to the repressing of the tender
as well as of the physical emotions, to the damming up of the libido,
which is love in its broadest sense.
Sometimes the poets tell us almost plainly their real loss, or suggest
it in such a manner that we feel the thought has become conscious
in the poem. Read in Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" the fifteen lines
beginning, "Is it well to wish thee happy," and one can see that the
victim is suffering because Amy is in another's embrace rather than in
that of the singer's. He thinks with maddening thoughts of the clown
she married.
"He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel forces,
Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse."
He calls sarcastically upon Amy to kiss her husband and take his hand.
"He will answer to the purpose." The singer clearly shows his pain
because he has been cheated out of physical pleasure.
When we come to the decadent poets, the loss is sung plainly. One of
the most beautiful poems of this kind is Dowson's _Cynara_. The poem
is frankly sexual. The poet, who was rejected by a restaurant keeper's
daughter, tries to console himself with another woman for his loss. The
words "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion" mean he
loves her in others. He tries to satisfy himself partly by thinking he
is with her while he is with another. It is a poem showing how a sexual
repression seeks an outlet with some one who did not arouse it and how
the poet forces himself to imagine that he is with the one who created
it. The poem makes this clear, that a love poem is always a complaint
that the libido is being dammed.
It is therefore true to say that even in the tenderest and sweetest
love lyrics, like those of Burns and Shelley for instance, one sees the
play of unconscious sexual forces. This fact does not make the poem any
the less moral or the poet any the less pure.
II
Probably the greatest objection to the application of psychoanalytic
methods to literature will be made to the transference of the sexual
interpretation of symbols from the realm of dreams to that of art. But
if the interpretation is correct in one sphere it is also true in the
other. Civilisation has made it necessary to refer in actual speech to
sexual matters in hidden ways, by symbolic representations; our faculty
of wit, due to the exercise of the censorship, also uses various
devices of symbolisation. Dreams and literature both make use of the
same symbols.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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