The He Return of the Repressed: Gothic Horror from the Castle of Otranto to Alien (Psychoanalysis & Culture) (Hardcover)

Although the book starts out well enough, testifying that Clemens has gone through a lot of research, at a certain point "Return of the Repressed" starts to descend into absurdity. The first books she explores, "The Castle of Otranto", "The Mysteries of Udolpho", "The Monk", and "Frankenstein", and the times in which they were written show how interactive their themes are with social issues.

But, as she describes those issues, one can hardly view them as being 'repressed': she quotes newspapers, intellectuals of the times, and epistolarians, among others, in evoking them (for instance, the status of women, censorship, industrialization). Clearly there was a lot of discussion, and I'd say that it was this discussion that helped change society, and not these Gothic novels. No one will deny that the times are reflected in novels, whether they are Gothic or sentimental, as well as the writer's opinions, but Clemens makes her idea about repression not one time plausible.

From the end of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" things go wrong horribly. Although there were some superficial and over-simplistic conclusions that are typical of most Freudian studies on fiction prior to this chapter, suddenly Clemens starts assuming the most outrageous things. When Mr. Hyde starts destroying Jekyll's library and in the process tears the portrait of Jekyll senior off the wall, Clemens identifies it as "an attack on the Father" that already started with Otranto. Likewise, she identifies "Jekyll" is a pun, being "je kill", the meaning of which she alludes to but never fully explains.

In the chapter on Dracula she posits ludicrous interpretations (no doubt she feels justified by invoking 'Jungian archetypes') to fit it into a world that is rapidly losing its traditional value to science. At one point she interprets "Mina Harker" to mean "my heart", with as sole justification that in 'some' Scandinavian languages, "min" means "my". When she subsequently identifies Stephen King's "The Shining" as poignant critique on American history, she loses her entire grip on the subject.

What could have been an interesting study seems to be the dying rattle of the psychoanalytic critique on fantastic literature. The problem, I think, is that when dealing with such literature, there somehow has to be a justification for its existence other than simple pleasure in reading about anomalities and supernatural terrors. Most of the time such justifications result in absurd theories and interpretations so that the readers and writers don't appear as aberrant personalities, to which Clemens' study testifies.