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... The founder of psychoanalysis was Freud, whose method of therapy aimed at the relief for man of its ills, and was an optic for the interpretation of culture and society. Among his followers, maybe Jacques Lacan was the most original, who mingled Freudian theory with structuralism and offered a structuralist Freud. ... Corresponding with Freud’s division of man’s growth to three phases_ oral, anal, and genital_, Lacan intersected it to real, imagery(or roughly mirror) and symbolic periods. ...
It is of high importance in order to that Freud’s psychoanalysis and its approach to literary works (as we can see in his own essay on Gradiva_a story written by German Jensen) have some essential shortages (aesthetically) for which Lacan’s psychology tries to compensate for. ... For this purpose, I have chosen a short story written by D.H.Lawrence entitled Daughters of the Vicar for some reasons. First I applied Freudian approach on it in a previous paper;
here I try to show that how Lacanian theory can alleviate so called shortcomings in analyzing literary texts and second, D.H. ...
Theoretical Background
In his discussion of the absolute division between the unconscious and the consciousness (or between id and ego), Freud introduces the idea of human self, or subject, as radically split. For Freud and psychoanalysis in general actions, thought, belief, and the concept of ‘self’ are all determined or shaped by the unconscious, and its drives and desires. ... You might think of Lacan as Freud+Saussure, with a dash of Lévi-Strauss, and even some seasoning of Derrida. But his main influential precursor is Freud. Lacan reinterprets Freud in light of structuralist and post-structuralist theories, turning psychoanalysis from an essentially humanist philosophy or theory into a post-structuralist one. Freud hoped that by bringing the contents of the unconscious into consciousness, he could minimize repression. ... He bases this on Freud’s account of the two main mechanisms of unconscious process, condensation and displacement. ...
This is Lacan’s linguistic translation of Freud’s picture of the unconscious as this chaotic realm of constantly shifting drives and desires. ... In Freud’s view, what breaks this oedipal desire up, is the father. ...
Review of Literature
Although Freud himself made some applications of his theories to art and literature, it remained for an English disciple, psychoanalyst Ernest Jones to provide us with the first full scale psychoanalytic treatment of a major literary work. ... With regard to the wide range of the theory’s tremendous impact upon modern writers (as James Joyce, Tennessee Williams, Philip Ruth, and D.H Lawrence, to mention only a few) and upon modern literary critics (e. ... in the essays of such major critics as Edmund Wilson, Ernest Jones, and Marie Bonaparte) it is important that the serious reader of literature consider Freud’s and Lacan’s theories, of course with some cautions.
Methodology
In the present paper, I will search for implications showing the effect of psychological behavior according to Freud’s and rather Lacan’s theories apparent in the structure of the mentioned short story. ... To assert such a claim, it would be more appropriate to pay attention to the analyses of the most outstanding critics of D.H.Lawrence; Kenneth Young believes that most of D.H. ... As we mentioned before, we can extend it to Lacan by implementing linguistic requirements to the work by examining the parallelism between Freud and Lacan.
Although it would be overly simplistic to explain Daughters of the vicar as a mere glass on psychological concept, Lacan’s theory does offer a convenient way to understand the cultural and structural situation of Lawrence’s heroine, Louisa. ...
Discussion
In General: It would be more appropriate to mention some aspect of D.H. ... Massy in his longest short story, Daughters of the Vicar, innumerable figures in Sons and Lovers which is a most brilliant picture of English lower-class provincial society in the Edwardian era; there is moreover, a certain unexpectedness, an aura of mystery, about the motives of some characters, and their course of actions. ... None of Lawrence’s main characters is really happy; even those who have the special Lawrencian wisdom and who are often regarded as masks of Lawrence himself (Birkin in Women in Love, Lilly in Aaron’s Road, Somers in Kangaroo and somehow Alfred in Daughters of the Vicar) , are hardly good advertisements for their wisdom, for it is their doubts rather than their joys which are stressed. ... By the time Lawrence wrote Sons and Lovers (1913) and its microcosm Daughters of the Vicar (1914) he thought that the radical unhappiness of civilized men and women was due to the development of industrialism; the machine had warped human nature, had bent it away from its true sources in nature (which we can observe exactly in Mr.Massy’s character in Daughters of theVicar). ...
Daughters of the Vicar happens in the collier-inhabited tiny hamlet called Aldecross where the cottages are filled with workmen. ... Lindley is the first vicar of Aldecross who, with his wife, has came to suit the convenience of the new miner populations of the town. ... Lindley, his father a vicar, and her sister Mary. ... Lindley, the vicar, symbolizes this new fraud identification (passing to symbolic through mirror stage) and his desire to attain an appropriate position among new workmen families, but others (pay close attention to the subtle concept of Lacanian Otherness) refuse to accept the arrangement, so he wants to pose (project in its psychoanalytic meaning) the results of his failure on his offspring as a divine law of God (Father, or in Lacanian term Phallus). ... His indecision results from fixation in what Freud calls anal or in Lacan’s terminology imagery stage. ... Applying Lacan’s theory upon D.H. ... I think that this approach, among other approaches will facilitate and cherish the reader’s sense of his reading Lawrence’s works, especially his tales and among them Daughters of the Vicar. ... Although exaggerating about this method of the literary analysis may make the reader theory-ridden and perhaps provide a misleading guideline to generalize Lacanian approach to all literary works in every context, the reader who rejects psychoanalysis as neurotic nonsense deprives himself of a valuable tool in understanding not literature but human nature and relationships among human beings (society); as we see as a central theme in D.H. ... besides, in spite of Freud, Lacan’s theory have encouraged a criticism which focuses not on the author but on the linguistic and psychological processes of the text altogether. ... Application of Lacan’s theory upon D.H.
Approximate Word count = 5812
Approximate Pages = 23.2
(250 words per page double spaced)
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