Art
and
Anxiety
ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS
ALTHOUGH
IN
some respects inc: edible, Little Red Riding Hood
is obviously a good story, and its simplicity recommends it as an intro–
duction to the necessarily rather speculative discussion of art and
anxiety which follows. This tale of the wolf and the grandmother is
primitive, folkish and fantastic, and the proper terms for its explica–
tion may seem irrelevant to higher forms of art, particularly those that
are intellectual and realistic. But I shall go on to suggest that to be
effective, those intellectual and realistic elements in imaginative litera–
ture must have a double reference, both to the world of outer reality
and to the kind of inner situation with which Little Red Riding Hood
deals, and that this second kind of reference is the essential one for
art.
If
it is difficult to suppose that a wolf in a night-cap, especially
after it began to speak, could be taken for one's grandmother, it is
easy to suppose that one's grandmother-or even one dearer than a
grandmother-could be taken for a wolf. According to the modes of
their time and place and social station, parents make children human
and social. They impose cultural institutions not only on young
minds, but on young emotions, and muscles and nerves. This is an in–
timate and unremitting process, carried on over a long period of time.
Even the best of parents often do it with force and in anger. They
also love. But to a very small child the moments of anger are quite
separate from those of love, and when his strongest impulses are
blocked for incomprehensible reasons by what can seem to him only
an unconditionally evil personal force, he responds in his rage with
equally unconditional statements of hate and the wish to kill, that
is, to remove. He "means" these statements, just as the parent "means"
his anger.
Such wishes, conscious and even put into words, are not blind
instincts or part of a fund of original sin invested in all of us, but con–
scious and understandable responses to a social situation. Neverthe–
less, they are not easy for the child to deal with as he grows older.
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In his love and dependence and desire to be good, he accepts the
parent's authority pretty much in the parent's terms, and within that
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