Wednesday 19 November 2014

Overcoming a complex through a metaphysical problem (Essay on Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

The term “Electra Complex” was first introduced by Carl Jung in 1913, to describe a psychosexual stage in which a young girl has the desire to compete with her mother and kill her for the love of her father (What Is the Electra Complex?). In such cases girls tend to act as their mothers.  In his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera uses the character of Tereza in order to represent a woman who has not overcome this psychosexual stage. She believes on a subconscious level that by proving her mother’s beliefs wrong, she will “kill” her. Thus, she becomes obsessed with her mother’s internal conflict about the relationship body and soul.  Kundera shows how the mother’s life has developed and how Tereza, through accepting the relationship between body and soul, manages to achieve happiness and “kill” her mother.
Throughout life, Tereza’s mother changes her opinion about the duality of body and soul numerous times and finally ends up denying both. Tereza’s mother has been brought up with the idea that she’s beautiful and that she looks like a painting:
When she was three or four, he would tell her she was the image of Raphael's madonna. Tereza's four-year-old mother never forgot it. When as an adolescent she sat at her desk in school, she would not listen to the teachers.” (42).
 This early perception of beauty and sanctity is misunderstood by the mother, and she is convinced that her sole role in life is to be like Raphael’s Madonna: to be beautiful, marry and give birth to a child.  By using the phrase “she never forgot”, Kundera implies these ideas have influenced her life’s decisions, she has not paid attention in her classes because the information she has been taught is useless for her. Nevertheless, she’s deceived by these beliefs.  Indeed they have brought her a husband, but she has realized that it isn’t what she wants: “Like her daughter, Tereza's mother frequently looked in the mirror. One day she discovered wrinkles near her eyes and decided her marriage made no sense”(42).  The mother’s childhood belief that she only needs to be like Raphael’s madonna for a prosperous life, fail her. Thus, she makes faulty analogies that since she got Tereza after marrying and then aged, marriage makes no sense as she is no longer beautiful and can’t  be like Raphael’s madonna. Thus, she demanded to be atoned for her sacrifice:
“She insisted her daughter remain with her in the world of immodesty, where youth and beauty mean nothing, where the world is nothing but a vast concentration camp of bodieswith souls invisible.” (47)
This shows the decision of the woman that the body is nothing special, and since the soul is not seen, it does not matter. Her belief that beauty is all proves to be wrong. Thus, she concludes that the world as a whole has no meaning, since everything changes. Tereza’s mother solves the metaphysical question by denying the body and soul.
Another view of the metaphysical question of the duality of body and soul is that of Tereza, who tries to deny her mother’s beliefs, by proving the connection between body and soul. By proving her mother wrong, she’ll “kill” her, which is a characteristic of the Electra Complex. From an early age, Tereza has been bullied with the belief that the body is not important. Due to the complex, she strives to prove that her body is unlike other bodies: “It was a longing to be a body unlike other bodies, to find that the surface of her face reflected the crew of the soul charging up from below” (47). Tereza starts looking at her body in the mirror, and due to the fact that she’s mentally developing and her figure is also changing, Tereza gets the impression that her physique is a reflection of herself. Even though her body develops, she gets to the point when she faces her mother’s problem: aging. She then posses a question to herself: “And if various parts of her body began to grow and shrink and Tereza no longer looked like herself, would she still be herself, would she still be Tereza? (139) Tereza starts doubting the relationship between body and soul because they are no longer developing together. The difference in the ideas of Tereza and her mother is the fact that the younger one starts believing that body and soul are two separate things but neither of them should be ignored. In the last part of the book Karenin’s Smile, Kundera provides the readers with another resolution that Tereza gets for the metaphysical question. It is that humans are bound to have a superego that makes them feel shame and brings disgust by the fact that they cannot be perfect, and that their body will start to age and retrograde. Tereza comes to this conclusion when she realizes why dogs don’t feel shame from their bodies: dogs were never expelled from Paradise. Karenin knew nothing about the duality of body and soul and had no concept of disgust. That is why Tereza felt so free and easy with him.”(29). Tereza realizes that one of the characteristics of humans that they are disgusted with the body and are constantly thinking about its relationship with the soul. Thus, Tereza comprehends that her obsession is due to the fact that she wants her soul to be “shining” through it.  Even if she at first follows her mother’s path in search of an answer to the metaphysical question, the girl stops as she realizes that a constant conflict between the body and soul is grounded in humans, and it prevents them from being happy, however, she still wants to prove herself better than her mother.
                Tereza pointing out that she has made better life choices, such as having a better marriage to her mother. Nevertheless, the girl realizes that her obsession with body and soul prevents her from having a good marriage. As stated in the previous paragraph, Tereza wants her body to reflect her soul and thus, when Tomas sleeps with other women, she feels that:
“It lacked the power to become the only body in Tomas's life. It had disappointed and deceived her… If her body had failed to become the only body for Tomas, and thereby lost her the biggest battle of her life, it could just as well go off on its own!” (139).
Again the obsession that Tereza has with her body is seen through this quote. She struggles with the importance of her physical appearance and connects the physical relationship that she has with Tomas to their spiritual relationship. Thus, she concludes that Tomas doesn’t love her, since he cheats on her body (the reflection of self) with other women. Later on in her life, Tereza realizes that her weakness comes from the fact that she’s in a constant struggle to disprove her mother’s belief and to prove to her that she has a healthier relationship as her husband doesn’t cheat on her. Nevertheless, the young woman realizes that Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing [Tomas] to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength and was transformed into the rabbit in her arms”(310). Tereza understands that her complex is keeping her away from happiness as she tries to make Tomas as weak as she is, rather than becoming strong herself. This is the moment when Tereza comprehends her mistake, trying to prove that her mother’s beliefs and life choices are worse than her own. This has made Tereza’s life a constant struggle within her. She strives to prove to her mother that she has a good marriage, which ends with the young woman’s recognition that her weaknesses and her uncertainties have made Tomas weak. When Tereza comprehends that, she becomes strong and realizes that she’s a different person and she has the right to have her own life and set of beliefs without having to disprove her mother. This realization shows that Tereza has overcame the Electra Complex as she no longer tries to disprove her mother’s life choices and beliefs on body and soul.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being brings up the metaphysical question about the duality of body and soul. In his book, Milan Kundera represents the beliefs of a mother and daughter on this subject throughout their lives. The younger one of them, Tereza, has an Electra Complex that causes her to want to disprove her mother’s beliefs. In the course of her search, Tereza reaches a conclusion that people are bound to think of the question about the duality of body and soul and that is what keeps them from being happy. By having this realization, Tereza overcomes the complex as she realizes she can have her own life and set of beliefs without the need to disproving her mother. Thus, Milan Kundera proves that although seemingly a bad thing, the Electra Complex is an important psychosexual stage, whose overcoming helps people in their psychological development.

 Work Cited:
Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. Print.
"What Is the Electra Complex?" About.com Psychology. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2014.

<http://psychology.about.com >.

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