The Erotic Motive in Literature — Background and Themes

The Unconscious as Literary Engine

Mordell's central claim is that every author reveals more than intended. He writes that 'works of the imagination open up to the reader hidden vistas in man's inner life just as dreams do.' The critic's task, then, is to trace a writer's books back to 'outward and inner events of his life' and to expose the unconscious emotions that guided the pen. This approach treats forgotten events and suppressed desires as active forces in literary production. Mordell insists that the principles he applies are 'fairly unimpeachable by science and experience,' though he offers no systematic defense of that assertion. Instead, he proceeds by analogy: as the psychoanalyst interprets dreams, the critic interprets literature, seeking 'ideal pictures inspired by past repressions.' The method is explicitly deterministic—the author's past dictates the text's hidden content.

Infantile Sexuality and Literary Origins

Chapter X, 'The Infantile Love Life of the Author and its Sublimations,' applies Freud's theory that children possess a sex life before puberty. Mordell argues that 'the nature of our later emotional and especially our love life is far more dependent upon the nature, aberrations, inhibitions, sublimations, developments and transformations of our infantile sex life than we ever in our wildest dreams imagined it to be.' He extends this to literary criticism: an author's work can be traced back to his infantile sex life, even when biographical details are scarce. For example, he suggests that homosexuality in literature—citing Shakespeare's Sonnets, Tennyson's In Memoriam, and Whitman's Calamus—originates in childhood bisexuality and the Œdipus complex. The boy who loses a strong father early and becomes over-attached to his mother may later identify with her and love boys like himself, a mechanism Mordell calls 'narcissism.'

Sexual Symbolism and the Atreus Legend

Mordell devotes a chapter to 'Sexual Symbolism in Literature' and another to 'Cannibalism: The Atreus Legend,' demonstrating his willingness to read myth and narrative through a Freudian lens. The Atreus story—featuring Thyestes eating his own children—is interpreted as an expression of repressed oral-sadistic fantasies. Mordell does not provide a close reading of the original texts in the excerpts, but his method is consistent: he treats plot elements as symbolic enactments of unconscious drives. The chapter on symbolism presumably catalogs objects and actions (e.g., towers, swords, journeys) as stand-ins for sexual organs or acts, a common practice in early psychoanalytic criticism. This approach risks reducing literature to a code, but Mordell frames it as a necessary corrective to conventional criticism that ignores the erotic substrate.

Psychoanalysis as Critical Tool

In the concluding chapter, Mordell argues that psychoanalysis can 'rid us of the evil influences of the past by making us aware of the unconscious disturbances.' He presents his method as both diagnostic and therapeutic: by exposing the erotic motives in literature, readers can purge themselves of repressed emotions. The book's structure—moving from theory to applied readings of Keats, Shelley, Poe, and Hearn—suggests that Mordell sees his work as a practical demonstration. Yet the excerpts reveal a tension: he claims his principles are 'well tested and infallible,' but the evidence he offers is often speculative. For instance, his analysis of Poe (Chapter XVI) is not excerpted here, but the table of contents indicates a psychoanalytic study that likely traces Poe's macabre themes to childhood trauma. Mordell's confidence in the method is unwavering, even as the science he cites was still contested in 1919.

Readers approaching The Erotic Motive in Literature should expect a polemical work that applies Freudian orthodoxy with little qualification. Mordell's readings are provocative but often rely on assertion rather than close textual evidence. The book is best understood as a historical document of early psychoanalytic criticism, revealing both the ambition and the limitations of applying clinical concepts to literary analysis. Those interested in the intersection of psychology and literature will find a clear, if dogmatic, statement of a once-influential approach.

Sometimes I think of that old Freudian study, how it traces hidden desires beneath the surface of words, and it reminds me of another kind of pursuit—finding truth within polite argument. Both whisper of what lies beneath the text, a quiet kinship of depth. The provincial letters of Blaise Pascal — Inside the Classic holds its own gentle fire, a different sort of passion, but no less real for being concealed airs.