Pecola’s Dissociation

For my Critical Research Paper, I chose to write about Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye”, and the character of Pecola. In the image, we see who is presumed to be Pecola in front of the mirror, staring at her reflection. However the actual Pecola does not have blue eyes, she in fact has brown eyes. This image is an illustration of Pecola’s dissociation. Freud defined dissociation as the “splitting of the mind and the dissociation of the personality as the centre of our position.” (Freud 2220) This is shown in the image because Pecola is detaching herself from her surroundings and begins to convince herself that she does in fact, have blue eyes, and that she is finally beautiful.

Emily’s Perversion

The image is portraying a female illustrating an attraction towards a dead body/corpse. Necrophilia is having a strong sexual attraction and eventually engaging in sexual intercourse with a corpse. Sigmund Freud, who is the foundation of psychoanalysis and every text we have read in class, would consider this illness as a perversion. Freud defines a perversion as any form of sexual behavior which deviates from the norm of heterosexual genital intercourse. This may include, but not limited to; homosexuality, bestiality (human/animal intercourse),etc. One of the texts read in this course is called “A Rose For Emily” in which the main character, Emily, shows signs of a perversion, a necrophilic perversion to be exact. She had a husband, whom she murdered because he was a homosexual (also another character with a perversion), and then proceeded to have intercourse with his corpse. This all comes together with Freud’s concept of perversions, which develop when a fixation, or something goes wrong in your psychosexual stages of development.

The Black Cat

I first read Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat when I was in 8th grade. However, I had no clue about what was going on and was just utterly clueless, and in class we just had a discussion on whether or not the narrator was insane or he was a cold-blooded murderer. Reading this story again with insight and knowledge on psychoanalysis, the story made a whole lot of sense now. This image represents the narrator’s most horrendous, inhumane act throughout the story, and the cat represents his torment, his source of insanity and the reasoning as to why he committed the acts he did. Throughout the course of the story, we see the huge role psychoanalysis plays in this text with concepts such as wishful impulse and the narrator acting upon it, repression, displacement, and literally so much more. There is usually a superstition on black cats and how they are usually bad luck; I guess this story is the perfect example for that.

Tears of Freedom: Tearing of the Yellow Wallpaper

Visual of "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Tears of Freedom: This image represents what I believe to be the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” cry of freedom. In the beginning of the story, the narrator compares the yellow wallpaper to bars, typically prison cells have bars, so the narrator is referring to the four walls she is locked in as a prison, she’s trapped. The narrator tearing up the wallpaper was a way of her saying that she will no longer be held captive or be treated like a child by neither her husband nor anyone else, thus beginning her path to freedom, which is to retrieve her sanity, that her husband and everyone else tore away from her.