650
SELMA FRAltER6
:unconscious undercurrent that would mar the innocence of a child's
fantasy and disturb the effects of the work
if
it were made explicit.
The
roc~ing
has the .ambiguous functioo Qf keeping the erotic
undercurrent silent and making it present; it. conceals and yet is
suggestive; a perfect symbol. And if we understand the rocking
as an erotic symbol we can also see how well it serves as the symbol
of impending tragedy. For this love of the boy for his mother is a
hopeless and for.bidden love, doomed by its nature.
We are also struck by the fact that this story of a boy's love
for his mother does not offend, while the incestuous love of the
man, Paul Morel, sometimes repels. It's easy to see why. This love
belongs to childhood; we accord it its place there, and in Law–
rence's treatment we are given the innocent fantasy of a child,
in
fact, the form in which oedipal love is expressed in childhood. And
when the child dies
in
Lawrence's story in a delirium .that is some–
how brought on by his mania to win and to make his mother rich,
the manifest absurdity of such a disease and such a death does not
enter into our thoughts at all. We have so completely entered the
child's fantasy that his illness and his death are the plausible and
the necessary conclusion.
I am sure that none of the effects of this story were conscious–
ly employed by Lawrence to describe an oedipal fantasy
in
child–
hood. It is most probable that Freud and the Oedipus complex
never entered his head in the writing of this story. He was simply
writing a story that wanted to be told, and in the writing a child–
hood fantasy of his own emerged. He would not have cared why
it emerged, he only wanted to capture a memory to play with it
again in his ·imagination and somehow to fix and hold in the story
the disturbing emotions that accompanied the fantasy.
In our own time we have seen that the novelist's
~ebt
to
psy–
choanalysis has increased but that the novel itself has not profited
much from this marriage. Ortega's hope that modern psychology
might yet bring forth a last flowering of the novel has only been
partially fulfilled. The young writer seems intimidated by psycho–
logical knowledge; he has lost confidence in his own eyes and
in
the validity of his own psychological insights. He borrows the
in–
sights
of
psychology to improve his impajred vil;ion· but· cannot
bring to his work the distinctive vision that should· be a novelist's
