Repotional Repression In Henry James's The Beast In The Jungle

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Nevertheless, there are two types of repression, or rather two stages, the first being primal repression as just discussed, which occurs mostly in infancy and will be explored specifically in relation to The Garden Party. Most importantly, an understanding of the second part of repression is most applicable to Henry James’s story, The Beast in the Jungle. Abbott (2011) observed that this is what Freud called ‘repression proper,’ which concerns the ‘after-pressure’ of both the repulsion and attraction of the instinct created by the primal repression. As mentioned before, the instinct itself does not seize to exist it just becomes sublimated and turned into a repression. Therefore, ‘the trend towards repression would fail in its purpose if these …show more content…

Unearthing Repression 1. It is clear that May is the conscious influence that causes the instinctual representative of Marcher’s repression to develop more profusely. Hence, ‘the whole question [of the beast] was a new luxury to him-that is, from the moment she was in possession.’ (743) Marcher does not know what is being repressed or what the ‘id’ instinctual drive is because the repression itself is something that always remains deep within the unconscious. The mystery surrounding what the instinctual representative remains as allusive as the text itself. 2. “Well, say to wait for, to have to meet, to face, to see suddenly breakout in my life; possibly annihilating me; possibly on the other hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of my world and leaving me to the consequences, however, they shape themselves.” (Stayer, 2012) 3. Many critics, notably Sedgwick, have seen Marcher’s ‘beast’ as his unacknowledged or unrecognised homosexuality as ‘a man of feeling didn’t cause himself to be accompanied by a woman on a tiger hunt.’ (750) 4. It is telling that Marcher’s version of the past is full of error, while May’s is full of corrections; ‘he was really still more pleased on her showing him, with amusement, that in his haste to make everything right, he had got most things rather wrong.’

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