Abstract
The stimulus to rethinking Elizabeth Gaskell's works in recent decades has come from feminist criticism. Feminists' interest in Gaskell, however, is not the aspect of Gaskell's unconscious incest narrative. Their responses to Freud's psycho-sexual theory are far from positive. Certainly, Freud puts special emphasis on the weight of a father's authority in culture. But feminist critics fail to perceive that Elizabeth Gaskell's early childhood trauma is associated with Freud's theory of secuality, the oedipal theory. It is precisely the nature of "unconscious thought" that we need to consider when we begin to read the novels of Gaskell critically. For example, "The Squire's Story" is a short story about Robinson Higgins' dissociative disorder. Yet, this story reveals the writer's understanding of human psychology through his wife, Catherine's confusion resulting from father-daughter covert incest. Beyond feminist criticism, a part of the psychoanalytic works of Freud provides a useful critical framework for analysing this novel. The purpose of this paper is to examine how to employ the unconscious mind to draw attention to the problems that Gaskell is concerned with. The importance of unconscious mental processes is presented here. Following the way in which character interact and the emotional conflicts between them, we can find Gaskell's own s7interpretation of Victorian England and her protest against patriarchal cruelty.
