“If often he was wrong and, at times, absurd
To us he is no more a person
Now but a whole climate of opinion
Under which we conduct our different lives.”
Auden’s words reverberated through the corridors of the college, as if trying to wither away the huge, cavernous walls of the magnificent old Victorian architectural masterpiece. Prof. Richard Felix’s lecture on the great master of Psychoanalysis had almost got embalmed into the very core of the macabre edifice over the years with its exposure to the same old theories of the unconscious, the pleasure principle which vivifies the ‘id’, the death wish and all other Freudian jargons again and again.
A soft breeze brought in the mist from outside into the lecture room making the aspiring literary scholars shiver to their bones. The chilly November pierced through the skin like thousand needles. Prof. Felix continued:
“His ideas function like myths for our culture. Modern literary criticism has been particularly influenced by Psychoanalysis. Freud’s own reading of literature and the subsequent critics who employed his methods pushed the limits of interpretation.”
The students were not amused much at this. Some were busy doing their own business and others were busily taking down lecture notes blindly without properly listening and understanding what the professor had been trying to impart.
The Professor looked with apprehension at the students and remained silent.
May be…, they might all end up like my hypocritical colleagues. Always lecturing about the pseudomoralistic values of the society and all comparable childish concepts. Oh! Such a waste of human brain power. It is so unbecoming of me to ever try to set anything straight, yet I shall try this.
Prof. Felix broke his silence and spoke with an impish charisma.
“I shall put forward a question before you all, a rather interesting one, so to speak, it’s about murder.”
The whole class cheered up like a bunch of kindergarten babes going hullabaloo over a can of chocolates. The back benchers who were dozing out, enjoying the coldest days of the year, opened their eyes to the commotion.
“Give me a most improbable yet correct reason as to why a person should murder another person.”
“The dead person might have been cruel to the other.”
“The murderer wanted to inherit the other’s property.”
“The killer envied the dead one’s beauty.”
“For money.”
“For power.”
“Just for the fun of it.”
Answers of all sorts kept flying from all directions.
“No…no…that is not the answer. All those possibilities you have mentioned may probably be masks for covering up the real intention. Can anybody say the correct answer?”
The Professor fostered their zest. The students had sprung back from laziness to a cheerful mood. They discussed among themselves the various possible answers. Prof. Felix was particularly watchful of Ms. Helen Kieler. She was the most brilliant, charismatic, beautiful and outright frightening student he ever had. She had a peculiar physiognomy, a look which pierces through the soul. She stares as if she knows what is going on inside you. And most of the time, she does. She remains silent throughout the class, staring straight into the eyes of the professor, as if trying to read his thoughts.
It is still very perplexing to think of her hidden motives to visit me this year while everyone had gone for vacation during the cruelest month of all. Why did she stay back here during vacation? The hostel is not open on those days. Where did she stay? Oh! I could have asked it to her then. She…, she just wanted to clarify her doubts on the Electra complex. What is so confusing about that? She stayed back only to clear this doubt? No way, she came to… .
“Murder is sexual, the murdered is the object of love for the murderer.” Helen had given her opinion and Prof. Felix was shocked, he was transported back from the dreary April to the chilly November.
Such brilliance! Such passion! Yes the repressed always returns. This girl is a boiling pot of murderous tendencies, and I remember, she had been talking all about murder on that April evening. I had little interest then to give serious thought over all that for the voyeur in me was relishing her virgin flesh with my eyes, satiating a carnivorous hunger. I can’t help playing with a fantasy in my mind, an idea that she was seeking her father substitute in me. Just like every other girl, she might had become a murderer in fantasy while she was a young baby imagining the killing of her mother to take her place with the father. As her teacher, I was also a father-figure for her, and now she must be having deep desire to successfully copulate with her father substitute. Then, she must be craving to eliminate Ms. Mary Rose out of her way now, for she is the fiancée of her current father-figure. I have seen the hatred in her eyes for Mary, a frightening, chilly look as cold as the November breeze flowing through the class now.
Dust and dirt kept falling from the ceiling with each stroke of the huge bell.
“Ok, that’s it for today. Your answers were all good and quite amusing as well. Give it good thought. We shall meet in the next class. Come prepared with your assignments then.” Prof. Felix hurriedly left the class almost running to avoid Helen. She was packing her books calmly and then arranged her desk, least bothered about anything.
“Clarissa’s thoughts and sensations on that day, and the interior monologues of others whose lives are interwoven with hers gradually reveal the characters of the central protagonists.” Dr. Mary Rose was reading out from an old note book which she herself had taken down when she was a student. Now her students were also doing the same and copying the exact same words coming out from her mouth on to the note books spread in front of them. While glancing over her students’ notebooks, something caught her attention.
Kill the dog, slow poison.
Helen was just moving the pen over her book. She was not listening to the words. May be after lunch she was a bit dizzy and the words on her book annoyed Dr. Mary Rose.
“Give me that Ms. Kieler, and get out of the class.” Shredded pieces of paper flew all over and Helen walked away with down cast head.
That night a lonely wolf sang a terrible dirge at the full moon putting a horrendous chill in the hearts of everyone in the women’s hostel. The warden, Madam Lizzie Yearnmore, would always find time to fill the hearts of young ladies with terror as she narrates the story of the spirit of a lonely wolf with unsatiable predatory hunger. She would tell them tales of young girls who had gone missing from the hostel in the past, who fell prey to the beast with a voracious appetite for living flesh, the beast which comes out of the misty deep forest to haunt the valley on full moon nights. This night too Madam Lizzie continued her story telling to her avid listeners who had heard the wolf singing its haunting threnody.
“Yes my dears, the wolf’s howl is irresistible to young ladies like you. Young women are enchanted by it as if by some magic and are drawn towards the terrible beast. How many innocent beauties have been consumed by the vile beast !”
“Oh! My…won’t the beast be able to jump over the gates and come here to get us.”
“No my dear but any unsuspecting beautiful girl like you could be charmed by the music of the beast. So, everyone should enter the hostel before the sun goes down, and the gates are to be locked at six in the evening itself for your own safety.”
“Madam Yearnmore is telling these lies so as to make us enter the hostel at six itself. She doesn’t like us to be with boys outside. She is really jealous for she is still a virgin. She might had some heart break in some affair before. Why else would she remain single?” Helen heard some girls whispering to each other. However many terror filled eyes reverently watched Madam Lizzie Yearnmore as she prepared to go to bed.
“Ma’am, I feel terribly afraid to sleep alone, may I sleep in your room tonight?” Ms. Helen Kieler asked with trepidation on her face and with shivering lips. Her voice cracked due to excitement. The warden noticed it and smiled at her.
“I have only one bed in my room dear. Do you think you can manage?”
“Oh! Thank you ma’am, I am deeply grateful to you for this.” Ms. Kieler took Lizzie Yearnmore’s hand and kissed it. She went with her to prepare the bed.
That night the November rain drenched the valley profusely. The next day the thick mist lazily refused to wake up from the precipitatious slumber of the previous night.
Prof. Felix laid down the attendance register on the table.
“Where is Ms. Kieler?”
“She is not feeling well today sir. She stayed back at the hostel and Madam Yearnmore is taking care of her.”
“Oh! ...Ok, we shall continue with our class.” Prof. Felix was quite disappointed. He knew he was missing her terribly.
“As I have already said, the unconscious motivations and meanings of a text suggest that we could never be sure of the intentions behind a text even if we had the author in the room with us and could ask him or her what he or she meant. The existence of the unconscious desires offers the possibility that there could be unconscious elements and levels of meanings that could be expressed in the text without the conscious knowledge and deliberations of the author.”
“Well sir, how can we then determine the unconscious, hidden content in the text?”
“Hmm, that’s a good question, Miss…?”
“Lisa, sir.”
“Oh! Yes Ms. Helen…”
“Sir, I am Lisa. Lisa Carol.”
“Oh!...yeah…yes…of course Miss Lisa…if only we could analyse the text just like a clinical psychoanalyst analyzing the words coming out from the mouth of his patient, then perhaps the hidden, unconscious elements could be brought out. And what is being brought out is the repressed content. So, you should be looking for repression within the content of the text as well as the social environment of the author. Do you get it? I’ll explain, consider the macabre in literature as well as legends of ghosts, vampires, werewolves etc. We can notice sexual tones to all these. Within the unconscious there is hidden animalistic sensuality in all of us, however we seldom show it externally. Vampires and werewolves consume bodily fluids and flesh. An interesting thing about these fantastical legends is that the victims of these beasts themselves turn into those beasts. Therefore expressions and gratification of beastly pleasures are contagious.”
The whole class is utterly disturbed. Many students could not agree with their teacher. A rebellious, questioning attitude pervaded all of them. The professor continued:
“This is actually unacceptable to our ego, our society, our pseudomoralistic religious values and systems. Most prominently, this is unacceptable to the male-centred society which loathes sexual freedom and envisages repression of desires. So sexual liberation is feared, sexually liberated women are labelled as witches, promiscuous people are symbolically presented as vampires and those with animalistic perversions, often murderous sexual perversions, are feared as werewolves. The werewolf transforms from man to beast only on full moon nights. As you all know, sexual desire is highest on full moon nights.”
“Oh! Is it so?” Somebody from the back benches asked loudly and all the students broke into laughter and giggling.
“Ok, Ok, now listen; let us get on with our class.”
Prof. Felix invited their attention back to him.
“These unacceptably liberated, promiscuous, perverted people could make others also like them through personal contact and mutual affairs, and their hidden, repressed desires would also be let loose. Hence Gothic romances present us with victims who themselves transform into the passionate creatures which had ravished them.”
“Sorry to interrupt you again sir, but I don’t think everyone would jump right in when presented with an opportunity for sexual freedom.”
“Yes, you are absolutely right Ms. Carol. However such people will be having immense desire within themselves which they strongly repress. Even though they do not indulge in realizing their desires, the knowledge about these desires within themselves would spark off guilty feeling and self-hatred. This self hatred becomes pathological and turns into suicidal tendency. The desire to annihilate oneself is also painful to recognize for the ego. So this self-annihilative desire is projected on others, and it turns into the desire to annihilate the other, that is, it results in murderous tendencies. Since these are generated by the repression of sexual desires, we can call them murderous perversities. Now murder also has a sexual reason.”
“Sir, when you say that sexually repressed people show murderous tendencies, it inherently implies that only sexually liberated people who go on engaging in promiscuous affairs are the only people without any murderous tendencies towards others.”
“No…no, I do not wish to say that, however, infact, liberated persons who hold a deep sense of guilt within themselves for all their wild passions could also feel this death wish and subsequently the need to murder those whom they love. Let alone sexually liberated people, consider true lovers, you will notice that those in love, if not literally, would kill their object of love, figuratively atleast. They give much pain to the other, by even deserting them, almost psychically killing the loved one.” Prof. Richard Felix glanced all over the class with contentment. Everyone has got dumb struck.
This is the result of telling the truth about man, he said to himself, Freud did this and he faced the most sharpest and meanest opposition any thinker or scientist ever faced from all sections of society. People try to prove him utterly wrong and to ridicule his theories just to find an escape route from these bare truths about the human mind. Now all my students are unable to counter the arguments I offered to them. Well, this is a good begining I wish Ms. Helen…beautiful Helen was also here at the lecture. She would have loved listening to it, for always she had a particular interest about murder, may be even a propensity for it.
The bustle and humming of the daily chores for preparing to go to the college keeps everyone on nail’s end in the women’s hostel every morning. Helen was already waiting, ready at the mess room for Lisa to return from the chapel.
It’s too much, waking me up also so early in the morning and dressing up and visiting the chapel before going to the college, while everyone else gets lots of time to get ready, and wait at the queue for the bathroom, this girl and her pious Christian friends have no other business other than offering prayers at the chapel, that too so far, it takes about an hour to walk up to it. The chapel is actually a very beautiful structure, though in an uncared, untidy state, snug within the wooded area of the plantation estates. It’s so huge a chapel at so remote a place with not much human activity. The outside view is actually menacing, however the interior makes me calm and cozy. Whenever I go there, I feel like wanting to stay in the chapel for more. Beyond the marshes and the pond, there is a small semetary. Lisa always talks about it, I have never seen it. I should someday go with her there. Oh! Where is this girl? We’ll be late for college today also. Ah, there she is.
“Hey, did you hear this? Madam Mary Rose is no more. Huh… didn’t she expel you from the class the other day? She got what she deserved. People say it’s a… .”
“What? !”
“Her body was found on the marshes near the old semetary.”
“Oh ! my…I…how can this…God !”
“Hey, what’s happening Helen? Don’t fall. Here, hold on to me. Oh! Please don’t fall, I can’t hold you up. Try to keep your eyes open, I shall call for help and alert the warden.”
Heavy fog had covered the corridor as in any other day in November when Prof. Richard walked towards the class room. It had been only about a week since his fiancée’s demise and he came back to work trying to push back all the agonizing events and catastrophic emotional shocks of the previous week into the unreal world of the past.
How can a person rely on his memory? For memory is never truth, but only a personalized conception of reality bygone. It is coloured by emotions, mental states and wishful dreaming of the particular person. I wonder whether all that I remember of the past week was ever real. Has she really gone, leaving me alone in the company of this agonizing absurdity called life? Is it true that she was not supposed to die at that moment, that her life was forcibly ended? The police officers say so. Who would want to murder her? She was such a nice and pretty… . Yes…someone might feel jealous…may be another woman…yes…it could be…yes…it is…it is her…Helen. I have no doubt. She is the killer. I have no doubt…I have no doubt… . Ah ! What am I thinking? It is impossible. How can she? ...even if she ever wanted…how can she?... . Am I going insane? Is this madness? I need rest. I need to sit somewhere. Oh ! It’s that bloody class room again.
“Sir, the whole class wish to convey our condolences.” The students said as a whole.
“I am not going to engage your class today. I can’t…I came here thinking that I could, but now… . I wanted to teach something…no… . I wanted to say something…what was it? ...um…about your assignments. I particularly want Ms. Helen to come to my chamber. I need to talk to you…I mean…suggest to you something about your assignment. Ok, we shall meet in the next class. This hour is free for you. And you, Ms. Helen come with me now to my chamber.”
The professor got back without waiting for a response from the students and Helen hurried to catch up with him. The long corridor leading to the chamber, gave an unusually unpleasant feeling to Helen as she walked more and more into the dark hollow of the corridor, which until up to that moment was so familiar to her. When she arrived at the chamber, he was already seated at his chair looking into the assignment she had submitted.
“Sir, may I,” she asked softly.
“Oh ! Yes, take your seat. I had been going through your assignment and in this you have stated that murderous perversities and sexual jealousies rarely ever lead to actual murder. You seem to suggest that the mind finds other vents to enjoy the pleasure associated with this in literary genres like suspense thrillers and murder mysteries. I don’t agree with your findings.”
“Why sir, isn’t it possible that…”
“No…no.” The Professor said with a harsh tone and continued:
“If a person is to enjoy murderous perversities or want to eliminate the competition for the opposite sex, he or she could commit murder.”
“Sir, but just as you said that death wish is satisfied by the literary genres of horror stories, Gothic horror romances, etc. as in the case of night mares, murderous tendencies can be secretly enjoyed by the unconscious mind with the genres of suspense thrillers and murder mysteries.” Prof. Felix could not look anymore into her eyes as she was staring straight into his soul. He looked again into the papers in front of him and gave it to her.
“You’ll have to do this assignment again. I am not at all convinced by your arguments.”
“But sir.”
“No buts, just do as I say.”
Ms. Helen Kieler remained silent and she felt her vision blurring due to the tear drops which had filled to the brim of her lower eye lids yet refuse to flow down her cheeks.
“Why are you standing here now? You need more explanation Ms. Kieler? I would give you an example and you just ponder over it yourself. Let us consider a girl who was greatly influenced and attracted by her father. Consider she had some healthy Electra complex which failed to go back into the recesses of her unconscious mind even during the period of infantile amnesia. It remains very much a conscious desire, and she finds a father substitute in another respectable man, who unfortunately is engaged for marriage with some other woman. Don’t you think this particular girl would find the fiancée of the father substitute as someone to be eliminated so as to posses him? Don’t you think this girl’s mind would contrive murder and actually commit it rather than just reading some thriller stories and mysteries?”
“What is all this, sir? I don’t understand. What do you intent to say?”
“I am talking about you Ms. Kieler. You are the girl who happened to have murderous tendencies. You are the one who had the desire for possessing me, keeping me all to yourself and so you had to eliminate Mary…my Mary…as beautiful as a red rose. You…you…killed her, I know you killed her.”
“You are mad. You are throwing allegations on me based on what, psychoanalytic theories? It’s just dream stuff, good for nothing other than finding some curious meanings out of literary texts. Totally childish; and, it appeals rather to the heart than to the intellect. No man in his sanest mind now would rely on Psychoanalysis after all these years since it has been proven as worthless in curing neurotics and also in analyzing real, live people.”
“What did you say? …you think Psychoanalysis is silly? What do you know about it? I have studied and taught about Psychoanalysis all these years and I know how to analyse people, literature, arts, society, religions and all other social institutions. I dare you, if you can make an accurate analysis as I have made about you.”
“Oh ! Please don’t push it professor, I know what you are. I can lay bare before you your real persona, that also using your fantastical theories of Psychoanalysis. I am not at all attracted to you. You are not a father-figure for me. It’s actually you who are having sexual desire towards me. You are a pervert, and to keep this away from your conscious acknowledgement, your unconscious mind has projected it on to me, and you thought I was attracted to you. And to tell you the truth, I was never attracted to any man for that matter and on the other hand, I found beautiful women really appealing and attractive. I was not seeking a father substitute in you, but was seeking a mother substitute in Ms. Mary Rose. And so I had no intention of eliminating her, but you, who were going to marry her. And yes, I had an affair with her, just one of the many I had. She found satisfaction in me when she was alive and you were not even able to touch her for that matter. You are such a loser.”
Prof. Felix was stunned to the very core of his soul. He crumbled with shame in front of his student. He found the ground beneath his feet slipping away. The very ground of Psychoanalysis about which he was very proud, gave him a shock unlike any; his late fiancée and his student had really created a huge scar on his vaulting ego.
In her passionate outburst Ms. Helen continued:
“I think you killed Mary. You desired your student and so you killed your fiancée so as to keep the way open for approaching me. You are the killer here. You are a psychopath. You are the one who killed all the girls who had gone missing from the college hostel. You are a beast…a beast which appears like a gentleman to others. You are but a perverse murderer whose conscious mind could not accept the innermost carnivorous desires within you. So you thought of yourself as a gentleman, but actually you are a beast who kills beauties. Now…Prof. Richard Felix, what do you think about this possibility? Psychoanalysis does offer this kind of an interpretation too. So whatever that has been said and whatever that has been heard between us remains only a mere possibility. Your version of things as well as mine have only a minor chance to be real, and yet there is a chance. We may never know what really happened. So all that conspired between us should remain within the four walls of this chamber. It shall remain a secret between us. It is better for everyone that it remains like that. Now would you excuse me sir, I have to go back to the class.”
The chill of the November breeze pierced flesh as if trying to freeze it. Prof. Richard Felix could not even move a finger as he remained silent and devastated, and the door closed in front of him as she left him to his solitude.