Freud

I have a confession to make, and I'm a little uncomfortable admitting it out loud. It might take me awhile to get to it. Okay, I think I'm ready.

*breathes*
*exhales*


I do not have penis envy.


I know. It's really shocking. Please, take a moment and collect yourself. I need a moment myself to recover from such an unheard of fact that an English major at a liberal arts college just might not follow the great psychoanalist himself and blindly agree with every theory Freud ever created, especially when it concerns literature.

Point 1: today in world masterpieces, we discussed a satire by Rokeya Hossein called "Sultana's Dream" in which Hossein proposes a reversal of the purdah system. (i.e. the men are secluded, not the women in this Islamic society)

Point 2: the piece was written and published in 1905, well after Freud began his quacked out methods and at a time in which he was very much in vogue

Point 3: at one point in the story, Hossein mentions that in "Ladyland"--where the dream takes place--the women took away the guns and swords that the men used to fight with, saying that they preferred to fight with the power of their minds instead of brute force


So, being in a class half full of English majors, someone felt the need to point out that guns and swords are phallic symbols (Point 3). I had the nerve--gasp!--to question the intentionality of inserting Freudian imagery into a piece written by a woman in Bangladesh. Oh my.

One of my fellow majorific friends decided to jump on the opposing bandwagon and cite Point 2 in a highly argumentative tone in which her cheeks flushed in indignation, saying that it was highly likely that Hossein would have at least been exposed to Freud--or psychoanalytic writings--by the time she wrote this piece.

As I dislike heated debate in classes with overzealous argumentative folks, I chose not to continue the argument, but then pointed out non-phallic Freudian symbolism of the women harnessing the power of the sun--sun=male, moon=female--to conquer the invading hordes. Yeah, so we read into that and then the class wound down.

My focus of this blog is that I'm so sick of Freud. Yes, I embraced Freudian analysis last semester in literary criticism because--why?--he is SO EASY to use. You can read Freudian imagery into bloody everything. For crying out loud, let's just read into the patriarchal society in the Bible and say that Moses' staff was used as a symbol of God's power. (Hm. That's actually an interesting conclusion...but not the point.)

The point being that there are hundreds of ways to interpret any number of literary works--we had a whole semester of learning about them, and we couldn't cover more than about six or eight--so why must we always return to Freud like a dog to its own vomit? Why can't we use our brains--granted the class is at 8am--and approach a piece from a different perspective?

Next time we discuss something in class, I'm putting in extra work and finding a more fitting method of interpretation that does NOT use Freud and his stupid sexual fixations. (Yes, that was purposeful inclusion of Freudian terminology.)