Oedipal Issues in Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra", Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" and Foucault's "I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother…" By Janet Oakes October 2006. Image from Antony and Cleopatra, Bogdanov/Thavoris English Shakespeare Company October 1998 Donald Cooper photographer.

In this paper I will discuss three characters from our readings whose “irrational passions” are particular to and revealing of unresolved Oedipal conflicts. I will use the term ‘Oedipal’ to denote the complex in both the male and female characters instead of introducing the term ‘Electra’ which is sometimes used to denote the female version of the complex. The pre-oedipal stages of psychosexual development and the relative success or failure of early attachment needs, help lay the foundation for successfully traversing the Oedipal conflict.

Successful resolution of Oedipal conflict helps individuals to relinquish the pleasure principle sufficiently to delay gratification and adapt to the reality principal. Eros binds Thanatos; the loving and aggressive drives can then be used and sublimated allowing individuals to fulfill their potential and achieve satisfaction in the areas of love and work. Unresolved Oedipal issues leave individuals under the sway of the repetition compulsion; unconscious patterns are reenacted in endless variations of rivalries, impossible love triangles, pyrrhic victories, guilt, and self-punishment/sabotage. This paper will trace the indications of unresolved Oedipal issues and their tragic impact on the unfolding of character and events in I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother…, Antony and Cleopatra, and Hedda Gabler. 

Pierre Rivera’s memoir describes his family environment; he is shuffled between his parent’s two households as one more pawn in their battle until his mother abandons him when he is ten. He portrays the relentless escalating conflict between his parents as a threat to his father’s (and by association his own) survival. His mother rejects Pierre, incidentally, almost as an extension of her reviled husband, so he never had an adequate nurturing attachment with her. “ I was witness to all [their] quarrels, I can say that I was not greatly attached to my Mother.” (63) 

This unstable living situation hindered Pierre’s possibility of working through his Oedipal conflicts. His unconscious Oedipal wishes toward his mother were contaminated by his fear of her destructive hostility. This frustration of normal needs for maternal affection and libidinal attachment may have intensified and distorted his erotic longings, “carnal passion troubled me: I believed that it was unworthy of me ever to think of indulging in it. Above all I had a horror of incest, which caused me to shun approaching the women in my family. When I thought I had come too close to them I made signs with my hand to repair the harm I believed I had done.” (102)

Pierre’s fear of sexuality extends to all females, his grandmothers, his sisters and even female animals such as hens. “They said too, that I had a horror of other women…”(202) He had the delusion that his sexual feelings exuded a noxious substance that would pollute and perhaps impregnate women, as though his mere his physical proximity would defile them. Pierre’s defense against his helpless frustration in the face of these overwhelming conflicts was a ‘reaction formation’, a fierce, protective allegiance to and identification with his father. Living in this emotionally threatening environment derails Pierre’s progression through the normal Oedipal stages; i.e. wishing to marry mother and eliminate father as a rival - castration anxiety - gradually relinquishing murderous wishes toward father and the desire for mother – learning instead to internalize father as an ego ideal with the hope of finding a woman like mother for himself one day.

His mother’s ongoing destructive attacks on his father and rejection of Pierre cause him to fear castration more from her than from his father. His identification with his father does not proceed from fearing castration by him - to introjecting the rules of the father - to forming a healthy super-ego/conscience. As a result his sense of morality is distorted, despite his strong incest prohibition. Perhaps to assuage his guilt about his unconscious incestuous wishes, he plans to become a priest, he says, “then later my ideas changed and I thought I should be as other men. Never the less I displayed singularities. My schoolmates noticed this and laughed at me. I ascribed their contempt to some acts of stupidity…I had worked the land with my Father but that did not suit my inclination at all. I had ideas of glory”. (101) 

Pierre’s developmental challenges contribute to and aggravate his problems with sexuality and with women, constitutional deficits along with the effects of environmental deprivation impair his capacity to function socially, “I saw how people looked upon me, most of them laughed at me. I applied myself diligently to find out what I should do to stop this and live in society, but I did not have tact enough to do that, I could not find words to say, and I could not appear sociable with young people of my own age, it was above all when I met girls in company that I lacked the words to address them” (103). His experiences of being ridiculed and mocked magnify the effects of maternal rejection and leave him feeling persecuted and inferior. He tries to compensate for these feelings with grandiose fantasies.

Pierre’s wish to achieving “glory” becomes bound up with his obsessive plan to ‘heroically’ save his father by killing his mother. He uses the defense mechanism of denial to ward off the incestuous wishes toward his mother and negates the murderous impulses towards his father by displacing them onto his mother. With tragic inevitability the internal psychic pressure of Pierre’s unresolved Oedipal conflicts become unbearable and he is driven by his impotent rage and his delusions of achieving “glory” to kill his mother, and brother and sister. 

Antony and Cleopatra explores the tension between reason and passion through Mark Antony’s character. He is in conflict, like the Oedipal son - torn between Caesar/ Rome, representing reason and the rival Father and Cleopatra/Egypt, representing passion and the lover/Mother. Antony had a filial relationship to his ruler, Julius Caesar, and Cleopatra was Julius’s lover and bore him a son. So Antony enacts the unconscious fantasy of triumphing over the father figure, who is now dead, and winning the mother by having an intense erotic relationship with Cleopatra. He escapes from the demands and responsibilities of the world (Rome) to the fertile valley of the Nile, Egypt, a more feminine, primordial place, a kingdom with an earlier history, like childhood and infancy. The seductive scene of Cleopatra on her barge promises a world of endless, voluptuous delights, 

She is a most triumphant lady
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water- the poop was beaten gold;
Purple sails and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them…(37) 

The frequent imagery of feasting and sex together suggest that oral issues colour Antony’s Oedipal struggles. Pompey tells him:

Your fine Egyptian cookery shall have 
The fame. I have heard that Julius Caesar grew fat with feasting there. (50)

And Enobarbus says: 

“Mark Antony. He will to his Egyptian dish again.” (52)

In this regressive fantasy world Antony he can gratify all his libidinal wishes. 

Caesar calls Antony his competitor (Oedipal rival) and criticizes his immature unwillingness to delay gratification:

… ‘tis to be chid-
As we rate boys who, being mature in knowledge,
Pawn their experience to their present pleasure
And so rebel to judgment.” (21) 

But for a while it seems that Antony can fulfill his fantasy of being the omnipotent king with his mother queen. Caesar describes the extravagant scene of Antony and Cleopatra: 

I’ the marketplace on a tribunal silvered,
Cleopatra and himself on chairs of gold
Were publicly enthroned; at the feet sat
Caesarian, whom they call my father’s son,
And all the unlawful issue of their lust
Since they have made between them. Unto her
He gave the stablishment of Egypt, made her
Of lower Syria, Cyprus, Lydia,
Absolute queen (69)

Anthony wishes to avoid the reality principle, represented by Rome, to avoid having to compromise and live under the authority of his new ruler, Octavius Caesar. He wants to be free of the limitations, responsibilities and expectations placed on him. He wants to abandon himself to the pleasure principle, to the fantasy of the ever abundant and giving mother, the endlessly gratifying breast – Cleopatra:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies. (39) 

Even choosing to fight by sea rather than land his reveals his desire to return to the watery feminine element, the womb, the unconscious, ‘la mer’, the mother. 

Antony
By sea, [I’ll fight] by sea.

Enobarbus
Most worthy sir, you therein throw away
The absolute soldiership you have by land,
Distract your army, which doth most consist
Of war-marked footmen, leave unexecuted
Your own renowned knowledge, quite forgo
The way which promises assurance, and
Give up yourself merely to chance and hazard
From firm security

Antony
I’ll fight at sea (75)

Antony is compelled, against all argument and reason, to abandon his element, the ‘firm security’ of solid ground, his strengths, his independence, and to regress to the watery world, back to the mother, to Cleopatra, to the sea. His soldiers entreat him, “do not fight by sea,…Let th’ Egyptians and the Phoenicians go a-ducking” (76) When Antony insists, they complain: “so our leaders led, and we are women’s men”. He has relinquished his capacity for rational decision-making and his responsibility to his troops. When the battle is lost because he follows when Cleopatra’s ship retreats, he laments: 

Oh whither hast thou led me Egypt 
Cleopatra O my lord, my lord,
Forgive my fearful sails! I little thought
You would have followed.
Antony Egypt, thou knew’st too well
My heart was to thy rudder tied by th’ strings,
And thou shouldst tow me after. O’er my spirit
Thy full supremacy thou knew’st and that
Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods
Command me. (81)

Antony is in the grip of his adhesive attachment to the mother figure. But his omnipotent fantasy that he can rest forever in the lap of libidinal pleasure begins to collapses as the consequences of his errors in judgment pile up. His aggression, previously harnessed and sublimated in his warrior role, turns against himself in shame and quilt and against Cleopatra in devaluing attacks….

Antony
O misery on’t! -the wise good seel our eyes,
In our own filth drop our clear judgments, make us
Adore our errors, laugh at’s while we strut
To our confusion

Cleopatra
O, is’t come to this?

Antony
I found you as a morsel cold upon
Dead Caesar’s trencher; nay, you were a fragment (89)

Antony projects his bad feeling/guilt onto Cleopatra, turning her from being a sumptuous feast into an unappetizing, cold morsel. This biting oral attack expresses part of the aggression left unbound by his unresolved Oedipal conflicts. “The law of psychic overdetermination – that is, that multiple psychic sources may exist for a single phenomenon of psychic expression…” John Klauber Illusion and Spontaneity in Psychoanalysis (125) propels the destructive events ending in the double suicide of Antony and Cleopatra.

“[Persons] engage in promiscuous relationships, have accidents, and respond with rage whenever they meet up with situations likely to arouse their envy, jealousy, or rivalry. In this group [of persons] the Oedipus complex dominates the scene.” Adam Limentani (277). This description characterizes both Mark Antony and Pierre Riviere, but Hedda Gabbler aces them both with her propensity for envy and spoiling. She is a ‘Father’s daughter’ and identifies with her (phallic) father through their shared love of horse back riding and shooting pistols. Hedda penis envy is also revealed by her aversion to the idea of having a baby. She does not want a baby either as a substitute for a penis, or as a fulfillment of femaleness. She holds her husband in distain, it seems no other man can live up to her Father. Her mother is never mentioned, Hedda may feel she has triumphed over her in the Oedipal struggle which makes it makes it hard for her to relinquish the father as her libidinal object. She treats the motherly Miss Tesman with contempt and generally relates to women as rivals to be envied, insulted and destroyed. Her envy is expressed when she is telling Thea how she wishes for once to “have the power to mould human destiny” 

Hedda… “Oh, if you could only understand how poor I am. And fate has made you so rich! (Clasps her passionately in her arms) I think I must burn your hair off, after all.” (45)

Hedda and Judge Brack speak of the advantages of triangular relationships. (28) Hedda’s repetition compulsion impels her to recreate the Oedipal triangle; when Thea is about to sit beside Lovborg, she says, “No, thank you, my little Thea! Not there! You’ll be good enough to come over here to me. I will sit between you.” (41) Thea is happy and excited that she has inspired Lovborg’s work and Hedda can’t stand it, she literally comes between them. Her destructive envy compels her to push Lovborg, a reformed alcoholic, to drink… This, as can be anticipated, is the beginning of his downfall. Hedda, in her jealous spite, is driven to destroy Lovborg’s manuscript. She sees it as the product Thea and Lovborg’s love, the child/baby of their intercourse. “Now I am burning your child, Thea! -Burning it curly-locks (throwing one or two more quires into the stove) Your child and Eilert Lovborg’s (throws the rest in) I am burning - I am burning your child.” (59) Hedda’s destructive rampage continues; she gives Lovborg the pistol to kill himself, saying: “At last a deed worth doing. I say there is beauty in this.” (41) Her wish for ‘artistic control’ is not satisfied as Lovborg kills himself in a messy, scandalous way. Finally, her hopeless despair drives her to kill herself. 

The successful working through and resolution of the Oedipal stage allows for a relinquishment of grandiose, omnipotent wishes and an ability to form compromise solutions without being overwhelmed with frustration, anger and destructiveness. Hedda, Pierre, and Antony have not achieved this; they cannot tolerate ambivalence, mourn losses, and adapt to the demands of the reality principle. Their aggressive, destructive energies are not muted, sublimated and transformed under the sway of Eros. Thanatos wins out and their unresolved Oedipal conflicts drive their unconscious choices, which end tragically in murder, suicide and death.

WORKS CITED

• Foucault, Michel (editor). I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother… A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century. Trans. Frank Jellinek. London: Random House, 1975. 
  
• Ibsen, Henrik. Hedda Gabler. New York: Dover, 1990. 
• Klauber, John. Difficulties in the Psychoanalytic Encounter. New York: Jason Aronson, 1981. 
• Limentani, Adam. A re-evaluation of acting out in relation to working through. International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 47: 274-282 
• Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. New York: Penguin, 1999.