Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 436
from
Brown Corpus
But on one occasion when I encountered a similar fantasy in a little boy who was my patient I began to understand the uncanny effects of this story.
It was, of course, a little boy's fantasy of winning his mother to himself, and replacing the father who could not give her the things she wanted -- a classical oedipal fantasy if you like -- but if it were only this the story would be banal.
The rocking is actually felt in the story, a terrible and ominous rhythm that prophesies the tragedy.
The rocking, I realized, is the single element in the story that carries the erotic message, the unspoken and unconscious undercurrent that would mar the innocence of a child's fantasy and disturb the effects of the work if it were made explicit.
The rocking has the ambiguous function of keeping the erotic undercurrent silent and making it present ; ;
And if we understand the rocking as an erotic symbol we can also see how well it serves as the symbol of impending tragedy.
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