(written for the course Modernism and Postmodernism Period by Wesleyan University – 2022)
Sigmund Freud was born in the mid-19th century and he was a neurologist and psychoanalyst. His experiences were based mainly during the First World War, when death was more common than imagined causing a sense of pessimism between the human being and his nature. Due to the conflicts that the civilization was going through, Freud developed a skepticism based on the general cultural pessimism. In The Future of an Illusion, he describes the mass delusion caused by the religion as a compensatory escape from the realities of existence, typical of the period. In Civilization and its Discontents written in 1929, the main theme is about “the demands of instinct and the restrictions of civilization” (Freud, p.6).
In a world where history has shown that people at any age used to live in a repressive way, he studied the elements of the narcissism and the consequences of the desire, “they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is true value in life” (Freud, p.11) which led to the ego and superego theories based on the disruption of the desire because of a threat causing pain, and his utmost work that he called Oedipus Complex projecting the relationship between father figures and daughter.
The transition from 19th to the 20th century was a very hard period, defined by World War I and II besides Civil Wars and French Revolution. The world scenario brings people to despair, to cry for their loved dead ones and to seek protection on someone superior to them, a possible Creator, “Religion restricts this play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering.” (Freud, p.31). Because of his skepticism, Freud used to use cocaine as an analgesic as well as a stimulant due to his buccal cancer, and he believed that the drug was a cure for many mental and physical problems as we can read in his paper On Coca from 1884.
He died at the age 83 on September 23, 1939 after years suffering from severe pain caused by his cancer which was declared inoperable. His friend and doctor Max Schur administered doses of morphine that resulted in Freud’s death.
Virginia Woolf, on the other side, used her own experiences to write novels, essays and journals. She was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882 and in 1912 she married Leonard Woolf. In 1941, at the age of 59, she committed suicide due to her mental illness.
History and memories were fundamental for her works, as we can see in To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway. As she was aware of the feminism thoughts and enlightenment writers, she included those ideas as well as the World War in her novels. Lily is her feminist character in To the Lighthouse, the one who didn’t get married, is a painter and lives independently, ‘With her little Chinese eyes and her puckered-up face she would never marry; but she was an independent little creature’, another moment of this reality happens during dinner with everybody, when Mrs. Ramsay thinks ‘she (Lilly) need not to marry, thanks heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution.”. Moreover, we have Andrew, one of the sons of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay who died during the war ‘A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.’, in Mrs. Dalloway, one of her main character is Septimus, a World War survivor ‘The War had taught him. It was sublime. He had gone through the whole show, friendship, European War, death, had won promotion, was still under thirty and was bound to survive’ while his wife Rezia is the enlightenment figure. This passage tell us how she would like her husband to be: ‘found him visiting churches, and fasting one day, drinking another, devouring Shakespeare, Darwin, The History of Civilisation and Bernard Shaw’, instead of being married to a mad husband.
In Night and Day, the novel focuses on the very sort of details: credible dialogue, realistic descriptions of early 20th-century settings, and investigations of issues such as class, politics, and suffrage. Her essay “Modern Novels” (1919; revised in 1925 as “Modern Fiction”) attacked the “materialists” who wrote about superficial rather than spiritual or “luminous” experiences.
To conclude this article, I mention Panthea Reid “Woolf’s haunting language, her prescient insights into wide-ranging historical, political, feminist, and artistic issues, and her revisionist experiments with novelistic form during a remarkably productive career altered the course of Modernist and postmodernist letters.”.
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. Civilizations and Its discontents. 1929
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. 1927
http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit/Civilization.Notes.html
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