荣格原型理论视角下的《快乐王子和其他故事》(2)

菜单

This paper analyzes several tales in Wilde’s short stories collection The Happy Prince and Other Fairy Tales with Jung’s archetypal images and inpiduation. In the first part, it mainly discusses several archetypal images used in “The Happy Prince” and “The Nightingale and the Rose”. We will see the real and cruel situation at that era and the ideal world Oscar wants to describe and pursuit. Next, it is mainly about the stories of “The Young King” and “The Star-Child”. In this part, Jung's inpiduation will be used to describe the inner world of the two main characters. The inpiduation of them will appear, in which way they become new ones and how they become much stronger.

2. Literature Review

Jianjie studies the aestheticism and critical realism in The Happy Prince and Other Fairy Tales. She considers Wilde as an aesthete, especially in “The Happy Prince”. In this story, the prince and the swallow are the images of love which should exist between people. She said that “The Happy Prince” sounds like a story with a happy ending while it was not that. Wilde used his aestheticism to express a sad story which shocked the readers.

In recent years, some domestic critics have begun to pay more attention to this novel. Recently, Xiong Fanghua in her paper “The Picture of An Unbalanced World: ‘Only Connect’ -An Archetypal Study of Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales” attempts to apply the Carl Jung archetypal theory and dream analysis theory to analyze several Wilde’s fairy tales to describe a unbalanced world which Wilde wanted to tell the readers. She used the archetypal images in the fairy tales to turn the characters from unconscious into conscious ones. She wanted to make a connection between man and universe through the analysis. So the author of this paper notes that archetypal study in this novel is still valuable.

The paper will base on former researches with Jung's archetypal theory to further explore the real and beautiful world Wilde wanted to create, and by analyzing the novel with inpiduation theory to discover the strong inner of the characters.

3. Jung's Archetypal Theory

Carl Jung, a Swiss psychologist and a follower of Freud, but broke away from Freudian theory, because he did not use Freud’s concepts of id and superego. Jung was fascinated with any sort of myth, art, dream, legend, and religious belief, because he regarded these as conscious expression of deep, largely unconscious psychological forces. Jung points out that: “the collective unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn” (Jung, 1968: 3).

Among the various archetypal images, the tyro/mentor and the Anima/Animus have the most frequent influence on the self and help a person to reach his integration of all the aspects of the personality. According to Jungian theory, the creation of the self occurs through a process known as inpiduation, in which the aspects of personality are integrated.

Inpiduation has an overall effect on the person, both mentally and physically. Thus, “There is often a movement from dealing with the persona at the start . . . to the ego at the second stage, to the shadow as the third stage, to the Anima or Animus, to the Self as the final stage. Some would interpose the Wise Old Man and the Wise Old Woman as spiritual archetypes coming before the final step of the Self” (John, 1990: 144). 文献综述

According to Jung’s archetypal theory, as long as a person realizes the meaning of his life, he gets to the point of his personality development, and he believes that this often happens at one's middle-age or after one’s forties. The first half of life’s tasks is to establish a family and career, and the task of the second half of life is to find out the internal meaning in his life and death. Jung once points out that a person has difficulties in the transition between the first stage and the second stage of life because our society prepares little for the middle part. So he pays more attention to the development of the psyche of those who are in their later years.