Freudian anachronism

[igenlode]

Atter spending a couple of hours this afternoon writing 400 words or so on Hertha's story of having been 'mesmerised' (hypnotised) as a child by an 'alienist' in Jewish Vienna, which was supposed to tie in with a suggestion that she is particularly susceptible to this sort of influence and hence was affected by the Phantom's call to Christine -- which we know is possible from Leroux canon at least -- I finally got round to doing some fact-checking.

Hertha would have been nine circa 1870 (depending on the date of the action, which I've assigned to the usual early 1880s). Nobody in the 1870s could possibly have been referring to Jung's archetypes, because Jung was 20th century. And even Sigmund Freud -- whom I'd carefully avoided naming, but was thinking of as a rival/contemporary of my nameless mind-doctor -- was only a medical student at that era, and couldn't possibly have been influencing anyone. Mesmerism was around all right, but well past the peak of its craze.

(And the whole issue of 'Hertha's family are Jewish', or at least converted Jews, is becoming a bit awkward, because it has been implied in various places but never explicitly stated. Can I/should I dodge the question indefinitely? I was imagining it coming up more openly in the final scene with Christine, but it's a bit of a weird (and tasteless?) reveal -- my instinct at this point is to hint at it but never actually state it at all.)

Comments

[watervole]

I think being Jewish would be a bad reveal, so yes, just keep it hinted, but no more.

[igenlode]

I was originally conceiving it as a sort of "you think you've got problems with being foreign? I've got people trying to diagnose me by the shape of my nose!" exchange between the two women, but it doesn't seem to feel appropriate to hold the information back throughout the whole story and then pull it out for that -- I've already had people complaining that Hertha's identity at the end of the first chapter (i.e. as Raoul's wife) comes across as a cheap reveal :-(

And it's an odd issue for a first-person narrator to handle, because it's not something she's actively thinking about a lot of the time (she isn't standing around in front of looking-glasses going 'how I hate my Jewish nose' like some 1960s American agony-aunt writer). But I feel that when it does come up she is consciously sidestepping the 'label'; she is not spelling it out to the reader because it's not something she wants her narrative to be associated with. Readers who are already in the know will get the shared reference without being told, and those who are blissfully unaware won't be judging her.

(Ironically for the family, moving to France as versus Vienna would probably end up worse from the point of view of anti-Semitic prejudice in the late 19th century, but they weren't to know that, and it's outside the scope of this timeline -- or story.)