2.3 Life Instinct 6
2.4 Death Instinct 7
Chapter Three Psychological Analysis of the Main Character—Lucy 8
3.1 Personality analysis of Lucy 8
3.1.1 Id of Lucy 8
3.1.2 Superego of Lucy 10
3.1.3 Ego of Lucy 11
3.1.4 The collision between Id, Ego, and Superego of Lucy 13
3.2 Defense Mechanism of Lucy 14
3.2.1 Repression of Lucy 14
3.2.2 Sublimation of Lucy—Music 16
3.3 Life Instinct of Lucy 17
3.4 Death Instinct of Lucy 18
3.4.1 Witness of Death 19
3.4.2 Desire of Death 19
3.5 The process of awakening of Lucy’s feminist consciousness. 20
Chapter Four Conclusion 21
Works Cited 23
A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Lucy in A Room with a View
Chapter One Introduction
1.1 The Author
E. M. Forster was a famous English novelist, critic and essayist. He was also one of the Bloomsbury Group, which included Leonard Woolf, Virginia, Clive Bell and the economist J. M. Keynes and so on. They were the elite of England in early twentieth century. He was known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels involving class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society.
Forster was born into a middle-class family in London in 1879. At first, Forster studied at Tonbridge School, “a public school which was remembered in his novels as ‘a center of stupidity, false morality and unspirituality’”(Liu 442). The unhappy experience in his childhood arose his antipathy towards the British upper-middle-class. At King's College, Cambridge, between 1897 and 1900, he was influenced by a sense of liberation and became a member of the Apostles. And then, he travelled many places and began his writing career. In addition, in the First World War, he volunteered for the International Red Cross.
1.2 The Novel
A Room with a View is the most romantic and optimistic book of Forster. It was Published in 1908, the novel touches upon many issues surrounding society and politics in early 20th century. It witnessed the differences between Medieval ages and the Renaissance. Forster compared two different cultures—England and Italy through the love story between Lucy and George. The thesis focuses on the awakening of Lucy’s female consciousness and the writer’s view on whole society and the female through the process of awakening.
1.2.1The Main Content
Lucy and Charlotte were young English middle-class women and they took their first visit to Florence, where they met the Emersons in a hotel. Lucy was depressed because she didn’t have a room with a view of the River Arno had been promised for everyone. Mr. Emerson offered to swap room, but because her prejudice, Miss Bartlett refused the offer . However, Lucy accepted the offer at last, and during the visit, Lucy and George fall in love with each other. George kissed Lucy unexpectedly, It was improper, so Lucy fle and went back to English. Lucy accepted her family’s arrangement and was engaged to Cecil, a musician in upper class. However, Lucy met George again and find what she needed was George's true nature. She was still restricted by the ethics, it's hard to expressed her love to George. George left with his broken heart. Mr. Emerson inspired her, and she decided to find George and They had a happy ending.