The Interplay of Literature and Psychology in Literary Productions: Lonely Days and Madame Bovary

Abstract

The interrelatedness of the study of literature and other disciplines such as Psychology is one of the basic tenets of Comparative Literature. Psychoanalysts maintain that the unconscious is the storehouse of our childhood painful experiences and emotions expunged from our consciousness because we do not want to know and be overwhelmed by them. Thus, they organize our current experience: we unconsciously behave in ways that will allow us to “play out”; without acquiescing it to ourselves, our conflicted feelings about the painful experiences and emotions we repress. With psychoanalytic criticism as the theoretical framework and textual analysis as our methodology, the objective of this study is to establish how Literature and Psychology, the two different disciplines, interplay through the archetypes; Yaremi and Emma Bovary in Lonely Days (2006) and Madame Bovary (1857). This study analyzes the personalities of these heroines and how they react to their instinctual impulses as their id remains in search of their lost object petit a in the face of the psychological events of their daily lives. We discover the creators’ societal criticism through these archetypes; while one is narcissistic and the other pessimistic as a result of their ego’s excessive deployment of defense mechanisms.