Psychoanalytical Reading of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure under Klein and Winnicott’s Perspectives[Latin Thesis]

Somayeh Aali

This thesis renders a psychoanalytical reading of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Tess of the d’Urbervilles using Melanie Klein’s (1882-1960) object-relations based line of theory, which within the context of this thesis is fortified with Donald Winnicott’s (1896-1971) tenets of false self, true self and holding environment. The worlds that Hardy portrays are permeated with poverty, inequality, class conflicts, socio-cultural mores, and sexually-charged matters; albeit, independent of these matters, whilst not denying their huge impacts, this thesis draws upon mother and infant interactions, which can shape psychic experiences of both parties mutually. In Kleinian space, infant’s early experiences are shaped and directed in relation with objects/breast, and the early positions of paranoid-schizoid position and depressive state can mold one’s emotional growth. In both Kleinian and Winnicottian stand, the bond between the dyad of mother/child possesses a great importance, because an appropriate unity can feed infant’s rudimentary ego and strengthen its fragile condition, which eventually leads to the development of a normal psyche. Having the dynamic of mother/child in mind, this thesis re-examines Hardy’s principal characters, Jude, Sue, Tess, Alec, and Angel and exposes the psychological intentions for their behaviors and conducts. The shift from the impacts of the external world to the internal world, while marks the significance of this study, will reveal how infantile/childhood early intimate relations can map out characters’ emotional developments, since as the results of this study will show, the behavioral flaws that the characters are displaying, including, emotional hunger, narcissistic as well as bipolar behaviors, and obsessive fantasies are all rooted back to the quality of mother/child bond.