Freud Was Right/Literature

• H.P. Lovecraft's Eldritch Abominations. With so much emphasis on their "tentacles," their Mind Rape powers and their just plain "abominableness", compared to our own "insignificance".
  • Bonus points for Lovecraft being inspired by chronic night terrors, in other words, what you see in his prose is straight out of the very abysses of the Subconscious Mind. Freud would be highly amused to psychoanalyze ol' H.P.
  • Also, his embarrassingly coincidental Meaningful Name.
    • Lampshaded in some derivative works.
• Aldous Huxley satirizes this concept mercilessly in Brave New World. Not only does this concept dictate the New World State (for example, the Oedipus Complex is used to justify destruction of the family), but Freud himself is fused with Henry Ford and worshipped as a God. Huxley also parodies his good friend, D.H. Lawrence, via John the Savage who shows shades of this in his Oedipus Complex (mildly echoing the protagonist of Sons and Lovers).
• Large swathes of the works of D.H. Lawrence. Hell, he wrote a short story where a rocking horse has Freudian overtones. His novel Sons and Lovers is pretty much a treatise on the Oedipus complex, and there's a very, very sexual nude wrestling scene in Women in Love.
• Parodied in Sharon Creech's Young Adult novel Walk Two Moons. A teacher reads a student submission complaining about the endless Subtext analysis of poetry in school, and concludes The Long List with "Maybe the forest doesn't represent sex. Maybe the forest is just a forest."
• The High Fantasy Kingdoms of Light by Alan Dean Foster deserves special mention for a truly brilliant Lampshading. Each main character has a different magical power, and the self-consciously macho Rival can make his sword double in length. The first time he uses it in combat, the Shallow Love Interest thanks him for saving the group, and he responds that he's always happy to extend his sword for her.
• In Golding's Lord of the Flies, the scene in which Jack and Roger kill the pig is written exactly like a rape scene, complete with very phallic descriptions of the boys' spears.
• Brian Jacques' Redwall fits this trope perfectly. The Hero of the first book is a thirteen-year-old mouseboy, who is told in cryptic messages and the odd bizarre dream sequence, including one involving a really big snake and a rose bearing swords instead of thorns, to go hunting for a very famous Sword (with a capital S). When he has it and has finished using it to defeat the villain, his dying mentor gives him permission to marry the girl he's been chasing for most of the book. The villains are all insanely jealous of this Sword and spend half their time trying to steal it. At one point in the prequel Mossflower, the female BigBad Tsarmina breaks the sword and locks up its owner in a very obvious case of castration symbolism. If one wants to read it this way, Cluny's recurring nightmare about being chased by the Abbey Warrior and stabbed to death takes on a whole new and deeply disturbing meaning. Might also explain why so few of the Big Bad characters are actually killed with the sword. To the Mooks, who don't get involved with the symbolism, it's just a sword, so they can be killed with it, but with the enemies who are more deeply involved, symbolic rape isn't a very heroic thing for the protagonists to do.
  • If we're going to go this route with the weaponry, Russa Nodrey's song about "me liddle stick o' wood" could be read as involving gender-confusion issues.
  • Oh, and a couple of people have claimed that Slagar the Cruel comes across as a paedophile, particularly in the Nelvana cartoon. He had perfectly good reasons for choosing child captives (they last longer, they can't fight back as well, and in the case of the Abbey kids it was "revenge" on their parents), but ... And then there's Ublaz's pink pearl fixation.
  • In Doomwyte, a very large blind snake gets trapped in a tunnel, and proceeds to inject poison into everything in reach. Then goes and dips his head in a pond.
  • As Russa Nodrey and Tammo are journeying to Redwall, the first words out of her mouth before they leave are "I hope my pancakes aren't getting squished in there."
  • Also see how much Accidental Innuendo the books contain, along with the Unfortunate Names.
• The Spenser novel Crimson Joy by Robert B. Parker (which draws its name from William Blake's poem) features a man who kills black women in a particularly "symbolic" way and leaves a red rose at each scene. His mother's name was Rose Black, and she had molested him.
• Harry Potter is full of this.
  • The second book is called Harry Potter and the CHAMBER OF SECRETS, for God's sake. Harry travels down a long slimy tube into a mysterious, dangerous chamber in which he finds a giant snake. He uses a big shiny sword to kill this giant snake, thereby saving his friend's sister, whom he later marries.
    • The extremely effeminate Lockheart is terrified to go down that long slimy tube? Until the two pubescent boys force him down, that is.
    • Harry stabbing the open diary with a fang that's squirting venom.
    • And the secret entrance was in the girls' bathroom.
    • Too bad Word of God later corrected readers who thought the little sister's name was Virginia.
    • Isn't it actually mentioned somewhere in the books than her name is Ginevra?
  • Also, in the first and third books, everyone is jealous of Harry's new broomstick. It's so much better than all the others. Everyone congratulates him on it and wants to stroke it. Ron can't wait to ride it. Malfoy is jealous until he gets super-brooms for all the Slytherin team. Hermione buys Harry a "Broomstick polishing Servicing kit". In contrast, Ron's wand breaks in two in the second book and won't work properly. He also only gets crappy broomsticks. Prof. Umbridge has an "unusually short" wand, and she punishes Harry, Ron and Fred by locking up their broomsticks. In general, Harry likes anything phallic (towers, brooms, wands) and hates anything resembling a womb or vagina (chambers, tunnels, dungeons, lakes, eggs, baths).
  • In The Tales of Beedle The Bard, Word of God says that no witch (i.e. woman) has ever been known to claim the Elder Wand.
  • Not to mention Harry spends his childhood in a closet under the stairs, forced to stay their by his intolerant family. Then, he is rescued and taken to a magical land where everyone is just like him. JK Rowling has denied that Harry Potter is an allegory for homosexuality -- but come on, he was living in the closet. Plus, Dumbledore's Gay.
    • Technically that little space under the stairs is a cupboard. You couldn't hang a lot of clothes in there (I don't know if it's American usage to call it a closet, but since J.K.R. is a brit, she almost certainly wouldn't have that association in mind when she wrote it -- in the UK, as far as I know, it's always called "the cupboard under the stairs.")
    • Also, before Harry got his Hogwarts letter, he was supposed to go to Stonewall] High.
  • When Cormac and Ron are conversing about Hermione, and it's clear to see that Cedric's broomstick is much, much larger than poor Ron's.]
    • Cormac's broomstick. Freudian slip much?
  • The entire game of Quiddich. There are balls, brooms, and hoops. Any professional Quidditch player with a grain of intelligence will be able to hit on any witch or wizard with enourmous ease. Come on, they're really asking for it.
    • Done spectacularly in a particular fanfic.
    • And this brilliant essay style fic.
  • "Wand" to "wang", anyone?
  • In the fourth book there's that scene in the graveyard where Harry and Voldemort are firing spells at each other and "their wands connected and a shock of electricity ran between them. Time seemed to hold still."
  • In Order of the Phoenix the villain, Umbridge, wants to deal with the problem of dark wizards by pretending they don't exist and teaching "Avoidance and Theoretics" instead of teaching the kids how to protect themselves.
    • The Room of Requirement from the same book? A hidden area where teenagers sneak off to engage in the forbidden activities Umbridge wants them not to do and risk getting into huge trouble if caught.
  • And let's not forget Book 7, when Hermione snapped Harry's wand in half. Sure, it was an accident, but Harry made it perfectly clear that he felt pretty much emasculated. He had to borrow Hermione's wand, and later a stolen wand, yet neither was able to replace the one he'd lost, and it just felt "wrong" to have them in his hand. Hermione refused to really believe any of this, as she had never had it happen to her, and didn't understand. Later, he's able to dominate Malfoy, and so claims his wand (and also, the Elder Wand), both of which allow him to defeat Voldemort, who threw away his own wand in order to gain a more powerful one. Harry later repairs his wand... which glows in joy and grows warm, ecstatic to be reunited with his hand. Ron also has his wand broken in the 2nd Book, and goes through similar feelings of impotence until he gains a new one that's properly his. It helps that the wand he used before was his brother Charlie's, symbolizing Ron's jealousy of his brothers' successes and masculinity, and his desire to get out from their shadows and be as "Alpha" as them.
  • In the movie, Cormac MacLaggen's deluxe-model broom, as compared to Ron's smaller thinner hand-me-down one in Half-Blood Prince.
  • When Voldemort takes Lucius' wand in Deathly Hallows (snapping off its cane handle), Lucius flinches as if he had just been castrated.
  • The scene where Hermione is tortured by Bellatrix Lestrange. It happens offscreen in the book, but you get to see plenty of it in the film adaptation, and it strongly resembles rape.
  • Legilimency, end of. It's even worse in the movie, mostly because of this speech.
  • In Order of the Phoenix, Neville Longbottom's cherished plant ejaculates sap when handled roughly.
  • In that last movie there's the incredibly awkward moment where Voldemort moans while hugging Draco and saying his name making it seem more like they're having sex.
• Pick a story about vampires. Any story. In fact, start with the classic: Dracula forces a young woman to drink his blood, after quietly invading her bedroom. And consider the two violent stakings of female vampires.
  • Well, one could easily interpret the basis entire vampire mythos has Freudian subtext. Consider: a strange gentleman or lady with a mysterious, seductive allure that feeds off of people by penetrating them with their oversized fangs and inducing blood flow to a certain part of the body (wherever they bit). The vampire will then proceed to feed off their "precious bodily fluids". This ritual can either cause pain (usually when forced) or a sense of euphoria (when done willingly), and will usually cause the victim to be enthralled to their attacker and/or become just like him/her. And they can only come out at night (Dark is a common symbol for deviancy). The "Horny Devils" interpretation for Vampires worked well in the time Dracula was published, given the contrast between the prudishness of society at that time and the deviant nature of Vampires.
• In Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hyde is often interpreted (by The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, most notoriously) as a metaphor for Jekyll's repressed homosexuality. Because we all know that "gay" is synonymous with "murderous gremlin-thing".
  • You've scarred me for the rest of my life
  • It's actually worth noting here that the most common interpretation, and one supposedly even supported by Stevenson himself, is that the story is a metaphor for cocaine addiction. During the time when the story itself was written, people were just starting to become aware of the psychological effects of such addiction and how the dependence on the drug (the formula) became more dominant over time (Hyde), and begn to subjugate the more normal individual (Jekyll) to its dependence. Of course, when one also takes into account the effects cocaine has on sexual ability (e.g., impotence, repressed libido, and more...), the story itself is still not completely inappropriate as an example here.
• The Discworld novel Equal Rites really is full of this stuff. From the magic manifesting itself as "hot dreams", to the wizard reincarnated as an apple tree "innocently" commenting that the heroine likes apples, to the phallic broomstick on the cover. The Annotated Pratchett Guide gives the details here. (In Lords and Ladies, however, a footnote dismisses the idea that the broomstick is a Freudian symbol as a "phallusy".)
  • Within the Discworld novels Nanny Ogg has written a recipe book, a book of traditional folk tales, and a book of etiquette and household management. All of them are really about sex (although the third one, which exists in the real world as Nanny Ogg's Cookbook isn't quite as much about sex as the first two, since the publishers had to recall them).

Granny Weatherwax: Maids of Honour?
Nanny Ogg: Weeelll, they starts out as Maids of Honour... but they ends up Tarts.

• • Not to mention the first and foremost of Discworld sexual innuendoes, the wizard's staff. And the various jokes surrounding it, such as the famous Ankh-Morpork song, "A Wizard's Staff has a Knob on the End". (Jokes that the wizards themselves, being mostly old fat academics traditionally not allowed to dally with women, never get. So what, they say, if a wizard is very proud of his staff and gives it a good polish and charges it with mystical energy every day? And the fact that the knobs on the ends of their [usually wooden] staffs grow there by magic, and by mystical resonance take on a shape symbolical of their owner? We really don't know what you laymen find so funny about it.)
  • The female witches ride broomsticks, but the wizards seldom ride their staffs (although technically they could get them up in the air...). And it's considered bad taste for a wizard to handle another wizard's staff.
  • And Lord Vetinari, Ankh-Morpork's Patrician (and iron bachelor), Does Not Have Balls. In fact, there's even a famous saying about it in Ankh-Morpork. And a humorous song. Ankh-Morpork's citizens take their amusement where they can find it. Only not during state balls because there aren't any. Obviously.
    • Neither do the wizards. They do not have balls. They do have their annual Excuse Me, though.
  • Unseen Academicals reuses the above-mentioned Freudian Slip pun from Lords and Ladies in a discussion about the "Bonk School"^[1] of philosophers:

Fassel: [...] they say cigars are--
Healstether: That is a fallacy!
Fassel: That's right, that's what I read.

• In the novel Things Fall Apart, the staple crop of the igbo village is yams, they're long, cylindrical and the more you have, the more manly you are perceived. You can probably figure out the symbolism here.
• The Inheritance Cycle. Big time.
• Warrior Cats has Jayfeather, who is roughly a teen-aged male protagonist who is forcibly sworn to a life-long vow of celibacy and spends a lot of time playing with a stick whenever he feels anxious. Yeah.
  • And Honeyfern talking about having kits with Berrynose just before being killed by a snake.
  • And The Fourth Apprentice, which features beavers, and a character named Woody. Seriously.
• The Da Vinci Code. If Dan Brown sees as many phallic symbols everywhere as his Author Avatar Robert Langdon does, he surely has a problem.
• Most likely an accident (unless Stephenie Meyer is writing the world's biggest TrollFic), but the apple on the front of Twilight is totally a clitoris (the hands are the hood pulled back, the wrists and arms... You get the picture).
  • Apples are actually very common in Christian imagery because they evoke the account of Adam and Eve. For example, C. S. Lewis's Words To Live By, pictured here. ^{[dead link]}
• Dragonfly in Amber, from Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, is full of this, but especially in the second book when Jamie enters a brothel armed with an enormous Dordogne sausage.
• "The Ball Poem" by John Berryman, a poem about a boy who is grief-stricken after losing his ball. After all, it is irreplaceable.
  • Leaving aside monthly-transformation-into-a-monster cracks, the connection between menarche and the onset of lycanthropy is explored in a short story called "Boobs" where a schoolgirl deals with bullies picking on her for developing by tearing them to shreds when she turns into a werewolf. The movie Ginger Snaps covers similar ground.
• Dune: Come on, admit it; the sandworms are Heighliner-sized penises. Even the rite of manhood for a sandrider is when he first mounts and then controls a worm. This has Unfortunate Implications given women who undergo this ceremony are basically treated no differently to men.
• Horses have commonly been associated with female sexuality; the taboo against women riding astride was rooted in men's fears that their wives would enjoy the activity a little too much. Towards the beginning of Mansfield Park, a big deal is made about the death of the heroine Fanny's pony. She was afraid to learn to ride at first but grew to love it and is extremely thrilled and grateful when Edmund -- with whom she is currently falling in love -- gives her a new horse. Then Fanny's romantic rival for Edmund's affections Mary Crawford moves in, and their relationship first begins causing Fanny pain when Edmund begins using the horse to teach Mary how to ride...
• The planet-filling organic ocean from Stanislaw Lem's Solaris was interpreted by one critic as a metaphor for a vagina. StanislawLem himself commented that this particular interpetation was faulty, since it was based on things that are solely in the English translation.^[2]
• Sextus Tarquinius and Lucretia in Ovid's Fasti. Sextus comes into Lucretia's bedroom at night... and what does he say? "I have a sword, Lucretia." He does have a nice shiny sword out too, but that isn't what he's talking about... He rapes her, she commits suicide, her father and husband get really pissed and overthrow the monarchy and usher in the Republic.
• Pick any Mary Renault novel you want, it's guaranteed to have Freud all over it. Return to Night: A young man falls in love with an older woman because she's his idealised mother-figure. He also likes to hang out in an underground cave with water in it, which resembles the womb, and his idea of heaven is pretty much the womb turned into a garden with a river. At the end, after a showdown with his mother, he is about to drown himself in the water in the cave, a "final return" to the womb, when his mother-figure lover turns up and saves him. The Last of the Wine and The Charioteer: Schoolboys fall in love with older guys who look like Dad. The Last of the Wine: A young man subconsciously sexually desires his stepmother, who has lived in the household since he was eight, and is angry at his father for sleeping with her; as a result of the stepmother thing he likes to sleep with older women. The Charioteer and Fire From Heaven: Four-year-old boys announce that they are going to marry their mothers. One of them also says he'll kill his father, and grows up with a subconscious wish to do it, which he cannot consciously face. There's also a scene in which the boy at age four sits on his mother, both of them naked, and it's described in a way that makes it sound a lot like sex, though it isn't. In both books, boys grow up gay because they identify with their mothers and resent or cannot respect or have little contact with their fathers. The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea: Struggle between worship of Mother and Father goddesses. She puts Freudian symbols in her characters' dreams: a broken climbing tool stands for a lack of phallus, running up a mountain like running upstairs stands for sex.
• People like to do this with Shakespeare. Hamlet gets the treatment a lot. Hamlet's in love with his mother, which is why he wants to kill Claudius. His unresolved Oedipus complex has made him homosexual, and he's also in love with Horatio.
  • It should be noted that there is no textual evidence for this (well, there may or may not be some Ho Yay between Hamlet and Horatio, but that's reaching). Hamlet wants to kill Claudius because Claudius murdered Hamlet's dad, and the ghost of said dad is urging him on, simple as that. Some of the blame for the popularity of the "Hamlet has an Oedipus complex" interpretation, at least in recent years, can be laid on the Mel Gibson film, which turns the concept Up to Eleven with maximum Squick.
    • It's Older Than They Think -- just check out the 1948 Olivier version, in which not only is Hamlet conflicted over his feelings, but his Mom is coming on to him like Mrs. Robinson (!). And the critics had been complaining about this kind of (mis)interpretation for at least two or three decades before that!
  • At least one teacher has made a point of interpreting the vial from which Romeo drinks poison as vaginal, and the dagger with which Juliet kills herself as phallic.
• Ian Fleming's James Bond novels probably have plenty of this, given Bond's propensity to have sex with almost every women he meets.
  • John Garnder's continuation novels have a female version of Q named Q'ute. Bond has a casual sexual relationship with her. Leaving looks aside for a second, John Gardner basically seems to be saying that Bond wants to have sex with Q.
• Wheel of Time: Take a look at the map of Tar Valon, where the (all female) Aes Sedai live, in a big tower...
• Little Red Riding Hood by Charles Perrault. A sexual symbol is not only limited to the protagonist's personal color, but there is a scene where Little Red Riding Hood strips for no reason whatsoever before she gets onto her grandmother's bed then the wolf eats her up.
• In Jane Eyre, the title character has a very charged exchange during the dead of night with her brooding Byronic boss, after she rescues him from a fire. In his bed. Dr. Freud need not trouble himself.

1. ↑ Bonk is a city in Überwald; its name is quite unfortunate (in British English, at least).
2. ↑ While Lem's linked opinion in English does not clarify which critic he is lambasting so, the original Polish entry makes it clear.