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Love’s Shadow: The Unconscious Underside of Romance in Hardy’s The Woodlanders
- Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature
- Mosaic, an interdisciplinary critical journal
- Volume 47, Number 2, June 2014
- pp. 153-167
- 10.1353/mos.2014.0012
- Article
- Additional Information
This essay uses Stephen Mitchell’s psychoanalytic relational theory to explore the unconscious dynamics of romance in Hardy’s The Woodlanders, examine how aggressive, sexual, and idealizing fantasies determine as well as destabilize romantic love, and how passion is structured by the tension between subjective fantasy and external reality.