For Bonaparte, the fireplace symbolizes female genitals. With the logic he developed, he finds the place of the letter hidden in Minister’s apartment, in full-view hanging over the fire-place. Dupin then takes it and brings it back to Queen. In the story, the letter is stolen and then it goes to the Minister. Let’s continue to focus on the story with psychoanalytical perspectives. The child, according to Lacan, wishes to be the phallus for the mother. Lacan as well, takes maternal penis not as an anatomical object, but as an apparatus which enables the first encounter with otherness and lack when the child senses that s/he is not the mother’s entire world and that the mother wants something more than and apart from the child. Maternal penis in Freudian understanding refers to the perspective of child, in which he considers the mother as castrated. Briefly, Bonaparte stresses that “purloined letter” in the story symbolizes regret for missing maternal penis and reproach for its loss. Freud did never write on Poe himself, but he wrote a preface as an introduction for Bonaparte’s book on Poe, in which he praised and approved Bonaparte’s work. Bonaparte was Poe expert, she evaluated his works and life on the basis of Freudian psychoanalysis. Before Jacques Lacan has proposed psychoanalytical literary criticism on Poe’s well known story Purloined Letter, already established classical-Freudian psychoanalytical approach was practiced on the story not by Freud himself but by French psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |