Applying Melanie Klein’s Theories of Child Development in “The Library Window”

            Margaret Oliphant’s attention to the female experience in “The Library Window” allows for larger meditations of gender and its sociocultural implications during the nineteenth century. Oliphant’s novella is dually situated within and alongside a girl presumably at the onset of puberty, whose namelessness reflects the ambiguity at the very core of this text. However, the first-person narrative and past tense explicitly denote the temporality of events. Our narrator describes her objects of fascination in retrospect and recollection of her youth. Her figurative return to St. Rule reverberates with Melanie Klein’s concepts of the depressive position, object-relations and views concerning child development. Applied within the context of “The Library Window,” Kleinian psychoanalytic theory reconfigures the ghostly male scholar as a psychical manifestation instead of a supernatural presence. Moreover, the ambivalent or multifaceted implications of the scholar complicates the story’s cerebral framework in his resistance to any singular diagnosis or meaning. His presence, as well as the eponymous library window are tangible mysteries to be solved in accordance to the Victorian ghost story genre. At other times, the text implies that he is the object of her sexual desires – gratifying them with his “wave” of acknowledgement – and a mechanism through which she affirms her sexuality (Oliphant V). The narrator could also be generating this figure from her marginalized and innately inaccessible position. Rather than the supernatural forces at work, Oliphant encodes social fears and discomfort in a contemporary ghost story to foreground the tension underlying female development in male-centric societies. This paper aims to explore the connection between the scholar and narrator as an interrogation of the dominant patriarchal rhetoric pervasive in Oliphant’s time, as well as broader Victorian anxieties regarding female intellectual development and cognitive capabilities.

Oliphant first establishes a social and familial precedent of Victorian gender constructs that inform the narrator’s experience. She recalls that “whenever we had anything the matter with us in these days, we were sent to St. Rule’s to get up our strength,” and her ailment is that she is “fond of thinking” (Oliphant I). Rather than abiding with the rest cure regimen, she actively engages her mind for various pursuits – “read[ing], listen[ing], and see[ing]” – which culminate in a sharp clarity and keen awareness of her internal and external environment (Oliphant I). The text specifies that her mind is always active and attuned to her environment, despite immersing herself in the internal worlds of her books. These details acknowledge the multi-directional flow of information and sensation between the narrator and her environment, which Klein emphasized as crucial in the construction of self and identity (Spillius 96). She operates within a system of inputs and outputs, locating herself at the very centre. Her aunt permits her time and space to do so, which is truly a luxury considering that her mother is preoccupied with keeping her daughter physically “busy” as a way to “keep nonsense out of [her] head” (Oliphant I). By associating thought with nonsense, the mother’s actions allude to the rhetoric that associates female thought and expression with meaninglessness or irrationality.

            The mother’s influence also illustrates the extent to which such rhetoric is perpetuated and transmitted externally through generations, beginning at an early age that precedes (and subsequently informs) sexual or physical development. To further emphasize socially conditioned influences on gender, the narrator cites the dynamics of aging and how “not [being] old . . . makes all the difference” in her perception of the self and world around her (Oliphant I). This echoes Elizabeth Spillius’ articulation of Kleinian development as fundamentally relative and along a continuum: “repeatedly revised” through ongoing exchanges between a child’s internal self and their external reality as they matured into adulthood (84). The concept of a “dynamic” and non-linear maturation was in direct opposition to pre-existing schools of thought – including Sigmund and Anna Freud’s – all of which framed development as a set of phases to be completed (Spillius 86).

However, development as a series of acute stages cannot account for the lasting and transmittable effects on other persons outside the self as portrayed in this passage. Oliphant explores mechanisms of transmission through the narrator’s father, who appears to encourage these pursuits as a writer or thinker himself. While it is not specified whether Aunt Mary is his sister or sister-in-law, I propose that she is the former, which would explain the mother’s antagonism to her daughter’s pursuits and why the narrator identifies so strongly with her father. He may embody an alternative to a patriarchally-defined masculinity that dismisses the female other to generate itself. For instance, Mr. Pitmilly – well-intentioned as he may be – commands the attention of the majority of Aunt Mary’s party guests with his “mild authority” as an older gentleman (Oliphant I). The young protagonist dislikes his habit of “laughing as he [speaks],” suggesting that he derives affirmation of his superior position when he dismisses a female speaker (Oliphant I). Furthermore, Mr. Pitmilly embellishes his explanation of the window’s optical illusion with scientific jargon, going so far to suggest that there is no window at all. Only Lady Carnbee calls him out as “gane gyte” (Oliphant I). According to the Oxford English Dictionary entry for “gyte”, Lady Carnbee accuses him to be “mad, out of one’s senses.”

Klein’s emphasis on object-relations is particularly useful in meditating upon the implications of Lady Carnabee’s comment, as well as the text’s transgression of physical, social, intellectual and gender constructs. When the narrator contrasts the contrived bustle of home with the “broad window-seat where one could collect so many things without being found fault with for untidiness,” she links herself with the drawing-room space (Oliphant I). Tamar Heller aptly notes how the curated recess reflects the narrator’s “intense interiority” (23). Kleinian psychoanalytic theory implicates the drawing-room’s tangible and psychological dimensionalities as analogous to the young narrator’s internal processes. In this manner, the walls and boundaries of St. Rule work to restrain the narrator’s mind in hand with her physical body (23).

            The text dismantles absolutes and thrives on paradoxes as evidenced by the “light which is daylight yet is not day” streaming through the recess window, the “occupation” of “doing nothing”, and instances where being “busy” is “nearly the same” as being “more idle than usual” (Oliphant II). Furthermore, it is through the drawing-room that the narrator “textual[ly] and sexual[ly] transgress[es],” as the window provides access to “the male preserve of the scholar’s study” (Heller 27). Through his authorship and dedicated study, the narrator vicariously engages in “the male learning of the college library” (Heller 24). The text questions the efficacy and symbolic function of walls and windows, as the protagonist identifies with the scholar despite physical and abstract obstacles: “My heart expand[ed] with the most curious sensation, as if of pride that, though I could not see, he did, and did not even require to come to the window, as I did, sitting close in the depth of the recess, with my eyes upon him, and almost seeing things through his eyes” (Oliphant IV). Heller suggests that the parallel gaze of the narrator highlights the bidirectional, not unidirectional, connection between St. Rule and the library and proposes that the male scholar is “an idealized form of her escape from domesticity” (28).

            The narrator’s ability to transcend St. Rule and gain access to the library via its window is a testament to the strength of her desire for authorship or autonomy, as well as her ability to construct her own internal reality of introjected external objects as understood by Klein. Kleinian psychoanalytic theory maintains that one’s internal reality and understanding of self is constituted by introjecting external objects (such as toys, books, family members and parents, predominantly the mother figure) within the psyche (Spillius 90). Jenni Calder interprets her metaphysical sight as evidence that “perception comes from within” (500). Together, these ideas culminate in the novella’s climax, as the narrator learns that library window is in fact a façade. The disappointment and anguish she feels upon learning that reality is not as she perceived it exemplifies one of Klein’s most important contributions to psychoanalysis: the depressive position. Klein coined the term to refer to the inevitable recognition of mismatch between the internalized object and its external counterpart (90-91). First experienced at infancy but revisited throughout one’s lifetime, the depressive position is deeply intertwined with mourning, often due to the loss of an external object. This pattern of loss and mourning thematically reappears twice more in Oliphant’s narrative:

You ask me did I ever see him again? . . . I have seen his face looking at me from a crowd. There was one time when I came home a widow from India, very sad, with my little children: I am certain I saw him there among all the people coming to welcome their friends. There was nobody to welcome me,--for I was not expected: and very sad was I, without a face I knew: when all at once I saw him, and he waved his hand to me. My heart leaped up again: I had forgotten who he was, but only that it was a face I knew, and I landed almost cheerfully, thinking here was some one who would help me. But he had disappeared, as he did from the window, with that one wave of his hand.

And again I was reminded of it all when old Lady Carnbee died. (V)

The above passage encapsulates much of Klein’s theories of development. The text reveals the dynamic nature of the depressive position, as well as the systems of feedback that inform experience. Acknowledging that the narrator “was not expected” reinforces the internal-external paradigm, in that the narrator is not expecting someone, nor is anyone expecting her (Oliphant V). Moreover, this final sequence does not provide closure for the narrator nor reader: “Why? How can I tell why? If I had known, I should have been contented, and it would not have mattered any more” (V). Perhaps this is yet another way in which the text foregrounds one mechanism of patriarchal social constructs, in which the female other is disenfranchised and “lack[s] the language to articulate an alternative [beyond the conventional]” (Calder 500). It is a self-fulfilling prophecy of wanting answers to a question you cannot articulate – and in turn, results in confinement within the depressive position (or more accurately, phase) as evidenced by Aunt Mary’s routine.

Klein ultimately believed that if an individual is able to successfully negotiate the inherently ambivalent and complex nature of the object or experience (coined as the “work” of the depressive position), they would gain a “more realistically perceived” understanding of the object, its relation to the self, and their environment (Spillius 90). “The Library Window” complicates this developmental process in its portrayal of female development in patriarchal Victorian society, or more broadly: male-centric cognitive frameworks.

Works Cited

Calder, Jenni. “Through Mrs Oliphant’s Library Window.” Women’s Writing, no. 3, Informa UK Limited, Oct. 2003, pp. 485–502. Crossref, doi:10.1080/09699080300200282.

"gane, v." OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/76564. Accessed 23 July 2020.

"gyte, adj." OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/82929. Accessed 23 July 2020.

Heller, Tamar. “Textual Seductions: Women’s Reading and Writing in Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Library Window.’” Victorian Literature and Culture, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 23-37. JSTOR, jstor.com/stable/25058371.

Oliphant, Margaret. “The Library Window.” Collected Stories. Project Gutenberg Australia, gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0606171h.html.

Spillius, Elizabeth Bott, et al. “Ch. 5: The Depressive Position.” The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. Routledge, 2011, pp. 84–102. doi:10.4324/9780203815762.

Written for ENGL 362: 18th Century Gothic Literature (2020S T2)