Catherine's dilemma between love and marriage in Wuthering Heights
论文作者:佚名论文属性:短文 essay登出时间:2009-04-03编辑:刘宝玲点击率:9822
论文字数:3000论文编号:org200904031240127929语种:中文 Chinese地区:中国价格:免费论文
关键词:呼啸山庄人物关系人物
Catherine's dilemma between love and marriage in Wuthering Heights
——The Psychoanalysis of love triangle relationship with Freud’s theory of personality
Abstract:
Wuthering Heights tells a story of superhuman love and revenge enacted on the English moors. In this
thesis, an attempt is made to analyze the love triangle relationship which leads to Catherine's dilemma between love and marriage in Wuthering Heights by virtue of Freud’s theory of personality.
Key words:
Wuthering Heights Freud’s theory of personality love triangle relationship
In Catherine's heart she knows what is right, but chooses what is wrong. It is her wrong decision that pushes her into the inextricable [LunWenJia.Com]dilemma between her love and marriage; it is her wrong choice that plunges the two families into chaos. In the mind, she is truly out of her way.
According to Sigmund Freud(1856—1939), the structure of the mind or personality consists three portions: the id, the ego, and the superego.“The id, which is the reservoir of biological impulses, constitutes the entire personality of the infant at birth. Its principle of operation, to guard the person from painful tension, is termed the pleasure principle. Inevitable frustrations of the id, together with what the child learns from his encounters with external reality, generate the ego, which is essentially a mechanism to minimize frustrations of the biological drives in the long run. It operates according to the reality principle … [LunWenNet.Com]The superego comprises the conscience, a partly conscious system of introjected moral inhibitions, and the ego-ideal, the source of the individual's standards for his own behavior. Like external reality, from which it derives, the superego often presents obstacles to the satisfaction of biological drives.”“In the mentally healthy person, these three systems form a unified and harmon
ious organization. Conversely, when the three systems of personality are at odds with one another the person is said to be maladjusted.” Here Catherine's tragic psychological process may be well illustrated by Freudian psychoanalysis.
“I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here?” Catherine's strange words reflect that the intelligent Emily Bronte had been earlier pondering over a same question in her work. What on earth is“the existence of Catherine's beyond Catherine”?
Here we may believe that Heathcliff stands for Catherine's instinctual nature and the strongest desire—her “id” in the depths of her soul; Edgar, her ideal “superego”, represents another part of her personality: the well-bred gracefulness and the superiority of a wealthy family; and she, herself is the “ego” tortured by the friction between the two in the disharmonious situation.
In the light of Freud's theory of personality, “the superego is the representation in the personality of the traditional values and ideals of society as they are handed down from parents to children.” Catherine's choice of Edgar as her husband is to satisfy her ideal “superego” to get wealth and high social position, which are the symbol of her class, on the basis of the
Education by her family and reality from her early childhood. She is a Miss of a noble family with a long
history of about three hundred years. Only the marriage well-matched in social and economic status could
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