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Reassessing Sigmund Freud's Literary Style Through a Comparative Study of the Principles and Fict IMPRESSIONS OF AN ANALYST: REASSESSING SIGMUND FREUD’S LITERARY STYLE THROUGH A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE PRINCIPLES AND FICTION OF FORD MADOX FORD, HENRY JAMES, VIRGINIA WOOLF & DOROTHY RICHARDSON by GEMMA BANKS A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY English Department School of English, Drama, American and Canadian Studies College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham April 2018 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract The connection between Sigmund Freud and modernism is firmly established and there is an increasing (though still limited) body of scholarship that adopts methods of literary analysis in approaching Freud’s texts. This thesis adds depth and specificity to a broad claim to literariness by arguing that Freud can be considered a practitioner of modern literary impressionism. The claim is substantiated through close textual analysis of key texts from James Strachey’s Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, alongside theory and fiction by significant impressionist authors Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson. The authors’ respective approaches to various aspects of literary impressionism are considered, such as the methods of textual development, the instability of genre, and the stylised techniques utilised to convey the impression. This research illustrates that whilst each of the chosen novelists engages with literary impressionism differently, Freud’s texts share common practice with each, facilitating the reassessment of the analyst as a specifically ‘impressionist’ author. For my growing family. Acknowledgements This research was funded by a three-year College of Arts and Law Scholarship from the University of Birmingham. I am indebted to my supervisors, Dr Rex Ferguson and Dr Deborah Longworth, for their challenging and incredibly helpful feedback on drafts of the thesis. The staff and postgraduate community in the School of English, Drama, American and Canadian studies have been kind enough to listen to and engage with my research, helping me to work through and hone ideas, especially through the EDACS postgraduate seminar series and the Centre for Modernist Cultures. I am grateful to Dr Oliver Herford for useful discussions on Henry James and early access to his work on James’s prefaces. Thanks also to the staff at the Freud Museum, London, who enabled me to undertake research in their archives. Special thanks go to Dr Eleanor Dobson, whose professional insights and profound friendship have made the PhD experience more than I could have hoped; to my husband, who has loved and supported me through the long and sometimes difficult road to submission of this thesis; and to the family that have helped in countless practical and indispensable ways to make all of this possible. Contents INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................. 1 Aims, Scope & Structure .................................................................................................................... 1 A Note on Translations ....................................................................................................................... 4 Psychoanalysis and/as Literature ........................................................................................................ 9 Impressionism ................................................................................................................................... 21 ON IMPRESSIONISM IN THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS: FREUD & FORD .................... 31 The Dream Records .......................................................................................................................... 38 Impressionism beyond the Dream Records ...................................................................................... 59 Trauma & Impressionism ................................................................................................................. 72 (RE)CONSTRUCTING PATIENT AND CHARACTER NARRATIVES: FREUD & JAMES ........ 86 Making Impressions: Textual Origins & the Central Consciousness ............................................... 97 Architecture & Excavation: Transforming the germ through the craft of impressionism .............. 112 Impressionist Stylistics in the Novel/Case ...................................................................................... 123 A Case Study of Maisie and Hans .............................................................................................. 130 BIOGRAPHICAL IMPRESSIONS: FREUD & WOOLF ................................................................. 142 Granite and Rainbow ...................................................................................................................... 146 Biography and Autobiography ........................................................................................................ 168 Appropriate Subjects ....................................................................................................................... 189 ‘Something Betwixt and Between’ ................................................................................................. 194 IMPRESSIONISTIC PILGRIMAGES: FREUD & RICHARDSON ................................................. 196 The Long Modernist Novel ............................................................................................................. 203 Miriam’s Pilgrimage ....................................................................................................................... 211 Authorial Pilgrimages ..................................................................................................................... 225 Interminability................................................................................................................................. 246 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................... 261 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................... 272 1 IMPRESSIONS OF AN ANALYST: REASSESSING SIGMUND FREUD’S LITERARY STYLE THROUGH A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE PRINCIPLES AND FICTION OF FORD MADOX FORD, HENRY JAMES, VIRGINIA WOOLF & DOROTHY RICHARDSON ‘All genuinely creative writings are the product of more than a single motive and more than a single impulse in the poet’s mind and are open to more than a single interpretation’.1 INTRODUCTION Aims, Scope & Structure This thesis argues that Sigmund Freud may be considered not simply a theorist within the context of modernism, as he has often been described, but an impressionist author producing literary works. As such, its chapters explore the similarities between Freud’s texts and those of established impressionist authors Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson. While the origins of literary impressionism predate Freud, and have been fruitfully explored across various geographical contexts (French, Russian, American and British, for instance) in the works of authors such as Walter Pater, Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant and Ivan Turgenev, this thesis limits itself to impressionists of the modernist period who pushed the boundaries of impressionism and whose works formed the apposite site of impressionist experimentation.2 As science and psychoanalysis were leading to new 1 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (First Part), ed. & trans. by James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols (London: Vintage, 2001), IV, p. 266. 2 Rebecca Bowler provides a useful overview of critical discourse on the impact of modernist cultural developments upon (the particularly visual aspects of) literary impressionism, to which she adds her own appreciation of the impact of modernist ‘cinema, photography, painting and theatre’ (p. 4). Rebecca Bowler, Literary Impressionism: Vision and Memory in 2 understandings of the mind, these authors recognised that the novel and various forms of life- writing also had to change in order to engage with these emerging insights. There is no evidence to suggest that Freud read or was directly influenced by any of the impressionist fiction or theory discussed at length in this thesis. Rather, as Lionel Trilling explains in his study ‘Freud and Literature’, ‘we must see that particular influences cannot be in question here but that what we must deal with is nothing less than a whole Zeitgeist, a direction of thought’.3 A core component in each of the respective chapters is the subject matter shared between psychoanalysis and impressionism – of exploring individual consciousness – but the thesis does not employ psychoanalysis as a theoretical influence on the production of modernist literature in
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