Love And Duty-A Psychoanalytic Interpretation Of The Bridges Of Madison County

Robert James Waller is a famous and popular American writer. He has original ideas and views on social problems such as love affairs and lovesickness between man and woman, marriage and family life. With a delicate and romantic writing style and the felicitous choice of words, he receives deep love from readers. The Bridges of Madison County is the most popular one in his works. Based on Freud's psychoanalytic literature criticism, the thesis analyzes the themes of the novel:love and duty.The Bridges of Madison County describes a romantic love story between Francesca and Robert in 1960s. A married woman Francesca living in Madison County, which falls in love and has an affair with an accidental man from Bellingham, Washington named Robert, a National Geographic photographer. He comes to Madison County in Iowa to photograph the seven covered bridges. Although they love each other very deeply, the story ends in tragedy because of the necessary social and moral responsibility.First of all, the thesis explores the inner psychological function of the hero and heroine based on Freud's psychoanalytic literature criticism discusses the relationship between the structure of human psychology and the complex behaviors of the hero and heroine and shows the inner psychological power exerted deep influences on personal and social activities. From the model of the human psyche point of view, the plot of the novel is the struggle of two chief characters' id, ego and superego. Through analyzing the structure of the hero and heroine's psychology, the study reveals the internal reasons of their behaviors. Freud divides the human mind into three parts:the id, the ego, and the superego. The model of the human psyche is also known as the tripartite model. According to this model, the uncoordinated instinctual trends are the "id"; the organized realistic part of the psyche is the "ego", and the critical and moralizing function the "super-ego" (Ruth 105). Moreover, the three parts of human psyche often react upon and struggle with each other. Especially, the id often comes into conflict with superego. Freud used the term ego strength to refer to the ego's ability to function despite these dueling forces. According to Freud, the key to a healthy personality is a balance between the id, the ego, and the superego.Second, from the ideas of psychoanalytic literature criticism, there are lots of symbols in The Bridges of Madison County. For example, the symbols represent love such as "redwing blackbird", "blue" and "ways" turn up repeatedly, and the symbol "mother" represents duty and so on. Literary symbols are dream symbols, and literature analysis is the process of dream interpretation. Readers can find the symbols in works to study the themes of the work and the subjective writing purpose of authors. Moreover, a literary work can be regarded as a case through analyzing the plot of the story, figure's language and behavior patterns to present the themes and potential implications in works. Symbolism has always been important in Freudian, especially in theories about dreams. The symbol about sexual is the heart of theories of dreams and the end-result of dream interpretation. Thus, this thesis tends to analyze and decode the connotation of the symbols in the novel so as to have a better understanding of the themes of the novel.