Towards the Roots of Literary Imagination: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in the Light of Freud’s Creative Writers and Day Dreaming

Abstract

Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, made a speech in 1907 named Creative Writers and Day Dreaming which means to say that no literature evolves as a complete work of imagination. He tries to explore the mysterious process of artistic creation on scientific grounds. According to him, the real inspiration of such a production lies deep into the childhood for the understanding of which, one must delve deeper into the world of a child; his plays and phantasies (or day dreams). In the lecture, he talks about how day dreams and phantasies inspire works of art. He has also exemplified how the conflicting currents of the author’s personal life reflect in their characters. If they failed personally, their characters indeed are jubilant in addressing those conflicts. He also talks about two concepts – ‘special providence’ and ‘splitting of the ego’ – and how they play a role in literary imagination. Even though Freud himself stated that, whatever he said are just ‘suggestions and encouragements (427)’ that leads towards the problem of the writer’s choice of his literary material, it is an interesting line of investigation. In this paper, we try to analyze The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne following the suggestions in the essay which is expected to throw a little light into its author’s fountain of creativity.

Keywords: Freud, Hawthorne, phantasy, day dream