Psychoanalytic Literary Analysis: Unveiling the Unconscious

Works of art such as books, paintings, poems, and sculptures oftentimes are said to express the feelings, personalities, interests, and desires of their creator. One method for interpreting these details from books and other literary works is known as psychoanalytic literary analysis. This analysis seeks to identify the nature of relationships between characters as well as the author’s relationship with the characters. In the analyses the critic will discuss interactions between characters and with the author and often go so far as to make assertions about the author’s conscious and unconscious reasons for telling their story in the way they did. While psychoanalytic criticism is well accepted it is not without its own critics. At times it

His assertion focuses on how their relationship is a displaced version of symbiotic relationship between mother and child. Emotionally, Heathcliff is the world to Catherine just as a mother is to a child and a child to a mother. (p. 366). This statement is supported by a passage in the novel in which Heathcliff has left and she seeks him calling for him at intervals and crying hard enough to beat out any child (p. 88-90). Upon Heathcliff’s return, Brontë uses language that Wion believes depicts the cessation of their relationship’s development in the Freud’s oral stage of libidinal development (p. 368). Brontë uses phrases such as “drank from hers” when discussing them gazing at each other and “They were too much absorbed in their mutual enjoyment…” (p. 99, 368). The use of this language is interesting and begs us to question if its use was intentional to display the basicness and necessity of their relationship as if to say that they could just as easily not be together as they could stop consuming sustenance. The novel demonstrates many times that the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff is fundamental to their existence. A major piece of evidence supporting this is Catherine’s breakdown when Heathcliff leaves as well as when Heathcliff and Edgar’s disagreement reaches a point where Edgar forces Catherine to decide between himself and

As foreshadowed by the title of the article, The Absent Mother in Wuthering Heights, Wion believes that Brontë’s mother dying when she was three had a large impact on her writing and it is part of the way that she deals with her loss. Wion believes that Nelly represents Brontë’s attempt at coming to terms with the loss of her mother by writing about and becoming, in fantasy, a mother herself. Wion attributes a great many aspects of Wuthering Heights to the author’s mother’s death including the death of all of the mothers in the novel (p. 367). While Wion attributes many things to Brontë’s unconscious, he also believes there are a number of things she consciously did which the thought or idea of she may never have entertained. For example, he believes that Brontë is aware of the fact that Catherine and Heathcliff’s love appears to be modeled off of the primal bond between a mother and child. Other statements such as “Narrative juxtapositions suggest that the mother-child relationship is on Brontë’s mind” (p. 367), lead us to question his assertions due to the fact that the novel was written over 160 years ago; therefore Wion can hardly say that he knows what is going on in the author’s mind at the time of writing the