Fragmented Daughters in the Novels of Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov and the Case Studies of Josef Breuer and Sándor Ferenczi

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Fragmented Daughters in the Novels of Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov and the Case Studies of Josef Breuer and Sándor Ferenczi DOCTORAL THESIS Fragmented Daughters in the Novels of Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov and the Case Studies of Josef Breuer and Sándor Ferenczi Christie, Laura Award date: 2009 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 30. Sep. 2021 Fragmented Daughters in the Novels of Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov and the Case Studies of Josef Breuer and Sándor Ferenczi by Laura Christie BA, MA A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD School of Arts Roehampton University 2009 Abstract This thesis focuses on the triadic relationships in works by Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov. I have used two psychoanalytic case studies, Bertha Pappenheim and Elma Pálos, to reflect how James and Nabokov use the analytic method for revealing stifled and fragmented voices in their daughter characters. I theorise that while Henry James prefigured the analytical doctor/patient dynamic in the father/daughter relationships in his novels, he also adds the mother figure, turning this into a triad. The controlling mother fragments the daughter’s speech and the situation of the triadic relationship damages the daughter’s ability to articulate her narrative. The novels, Watch and Ward (1871), Washington Square (1880), and The Awkward Age (1899) show James’s developing recognition of the role the mother plays in the triad, as well as his own role as author and narrator of the daughter’s story. The case studies also contain damaging triadic relationships. There has been limited interest in the triads and this, so far, has not been commented upon as a reason for the daughter’s mental disturbance. I use unpublished letters to try to uncover the ‘real’ voice of Elma. I see that literary and psychological criticism has been guilty of mistakes in research and misrepresentation. This has further fragmented the story of these women. I hope to show that both Henry James and Sigmund Freud inspired Vladimir Nabokov, despite his vehement opinions against them. He presents the same scenario of the triadic relationship, in a fictional but analytical setting, to express his own anxiety about ‘losing’ his native language. His feminised struggle is apparent in Lolita (1955), and even more so in the character of Lucette, in Ada (1969). Nabokov sees that, in analysis, the mother is a 3 threat to the daughter’s self-expression. He develops the mother character in his fiction to represent this discovery. While analysts think they can successfully narrate the female patient’s story, both Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov acknowledge the struggle and possible futility of this. Contents Introduction 8 Literature Review 27 Part I Henry James and the Master’s Daughters 33 Chapter One Henry James and Psychology 34 The Climate of the Times 37 Biography and Psychology 38 Family and the Silent Sister 39 The Minny Effect 45 Henry James’s Writing Biography 48 Chapter Two Watch and Ward The Original of Nora 53 The Role of the Father 59 Nora’s Voice 65 The Story of Watch and Ward 72 Conclusion 79 Chapter Three Washington Square The Spinster’s Revenge 82 Psychology and the Anticipation of the New Woman 84 The ‘Third Element’ 86 The Ladies’ Doctor and his Patient 92 The Grief that does not Speak 94 Chapter Four The Awkward Age The Avenging New Woman 109 The Dangerous Mother 112 The Understanding of Analysis 117 The Hidden Narrative of Nanda 119 Conclusion 129 Part II Narrating Trauma: The Submerged Voice of the Female Case History 132 Prologue 133 Chapter Five The Hidden Voice of Bertha Pappenheim 136 The Myth of Anna O 143 Chapter Six The Root of the Problem 151 Finding a Voice 156 Chapter Seven The Story of Elma Pálos 166 Psychoanalysis: A Developing Science 166 The Case of Elma Pálos 169 Chapter Eight The Story of the Story 182 The Fragmented Voice 182 The Mother as Martyr 187 The Story of the Story 195 Part III Vladimir Nabokov’s Tales of Atonement 203 Chapter Nine The Struggle for Language 204 Mrs Vladimir Nabokov 210 The All-American Girl 213 Conclusion 221 Chapter Ten Lolita Nabokov and the Viennese Witch Doctor 223 Mrs Haze: The Jealous Snake 226 The Fragmented Garden 231 Mrs Richard F. Schiller 238 Conclusive Evidence 240 Chapter Eleven Ada or Ardor The ‘Impeccable Paranymph’ 243 Lucette: A Fragment of an Image 246 The Patient Lucette 252 Lucette’s Narrative Voice 261 Nabokov’s Anxiety of Influence 267 Conclusion 271 Appendix 277 Bibliography 291 6 List of Illustrations ‘He had a sweet, light, tenor voice,’ by George Du Maurier 87 Bertha Pappenheim at Bellevue Sanatorium, Kreuzlingen, 1882 144 Outdoor Group Portrait of the Women on the First Board of the Weibliche Fuersorge, 1904 160 Freud and Ferenczi with Members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society 168 Young Sándor Ferenczi 171 Young Elma Pálos 175 Gizella Pálos and Sándor Ferenczi 188 Elma and husband, Johann Nilsen Laurvik 192 Diagram of Freud’s Theory of Elma’s ‘Surface Current’ 194 Older Elma Pálos 198 Magda, Gizella and Elma 202 Vladimir Nabokov with Brother, Sergey, and Mlle Miauton 209 Sally Horner and Mother 216 Lora Lee Michel with Rev. Sundstrum 217 Lora Lee in Juvenile Hall 218 Lora Lee Scott 219 The Veen Family Tree 242 7 Acknowledgements Thanks to Jenny Hartley, Simon Edwards, and Sarah Turvey for their constant guidance; to Ani Zavody for her helpful translations; and to Nigel Cochrane at the University of Essex for his prompt assistance. 8 Introduction My feelings towards James are rather complicated. I really dislike him intensely but now and then the figure in the phrase, the turn of the epithet, the screw of an absurd adverb, cause me a kind of electric tingle, as if some current of his was also passing through my own blood. –An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov, 19671 A literary relationship between Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov would develop throughout the twentieth century leading Barbara Eckstein, writing for The Henry James Review, to say ‘I cannot read James as though I have not read Nabokov; specifically, I cannot read What Maisie Knew as though I have not read Lolita’ (190). The figures of the daughter and the older fatherly male are found all through the works of these two writers, trampling over one another in an effort to be heard. These figures embody not only the different cultural, political and psychological ideas of the time, but reflect an impulse to explore a part of the author’s own life, and thus to penetrate a realm of the psyche that is usually only attempted in autobiography and personal correspondence. Father and daughter figures from the literary canon have been discussed for their highly sexualised and mutually destructive relationships. What has not been analysed sufficiently is the part the mother figure plays in the lives of this dyad. The combining of these three figures to focus on a damaging triadic relationship is a theme that highlights the concerns these two authors wish to convey to their readers. Their conjectures concerning the dangers of destructive mothering and the mother’s role in prolonging a harmful father figure/daughter relationship are often epitomised by the silencing and fragmenting of the daughter’s voice. Adrienne Rich, in her revealing study Of Woman Born, on mothers and motherhood says: 1 Alfred Appel Jr. (1967) 9 This cathexis between mother and daughter – essential, distorted, misused – is the great unwritten story. Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement […] Yet this relationship has been minimized and trivialized in the annals of patriarchy. (225- 6) In The Lost Tradition, Cathy N. Davidson and E.M. Broner have brought together a historical catalogue of mothers and daughters, and have highlighted the mother’s voice in nineteenth century fiction. In her contribution, Susan Peck Macdonald suggests that ‘the absence of mothers, then, seems to me to derive not from the impotence or unimportance of mothers, but from the almost excessive power of motherhood’ (58). My contention is that James and Nabokov subtly use both the underlying and the explicitly sexualised father/daughter relationship to conceal the threatening mother figure. The attention paid to the mother and daughter in their fiction is not trivialized and is essentially the nexus of the daughter’s narrative. This thesis examines the interest James and Nabokov took in their literary explorations of this triadic relationship, and the damaging effects on the voice of the daughter. It argues that both authors use some form of the case study as a methodology whereby James and Nabokov situate these daughters within their texts while reflecting on their own role as author of these studies.
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