Peter Shaffer’s Revision of The Oedipal Complex in Equus

In Equus, playwright Peter Shaffer creatively revises Sigmund Freud’s Oedipal complex, taking the psychoanalytic paradigm to real-life, violent extremes. Frank, Dora, and Alan Strang comprise the traditional Oedipal triangle of father, mother, and son respectively. However, their narrative transforms the “textbook” Oedipal outcome of a son who learns to “repress” sexual desire for the mother in fear of being “castrated” by the father (Fowler 413). Equus presents repeated symbolic castrations suffered by Alan, who refuses to submit to his father and integrate himself successfully into society. In the text, Alan’s efforts to realize his Oedipal desire for the mother take the form of his close, religious bond with Dora, a bond that is later replaced by his obsession with horses.
Freud’s Oedipal complex is embedded within the text of Equus. In keeping with Freud’s model, Frank Strang is a removed, authoritative father. He is also disapproving and suspicious of his wife and son’s close relationship. Frank states, “They’ve always been as thick as thieves. I can’t say I entirely approve” (Shaffer 27). Moreover, Dora is in Alan’s bedroom “hour after hour,” talking to him about the Bible. It is clear that Frank monitors this activity since Dora and Alan are “whispering” and he stands close enough to hear what they are discussing (27).
Alan and Dora’s “incestuous” bond can be read in this shared interest in religion, an interest that Alan later develops into a private obsession with horses. The origin of Alan’s preoccupation with horses can be found partly in Dora’s repeated readings to him when he was young from a book about a white horse named Prince who would only allow his “young Master” to ride him (24). Dora also teaches Alan about “pagans” who “thought horse and rider [were] one person…a god” (24). These two stories reveal how Alan’s close relationship with his mother slowly takes the shape of a fixation on horses, along with the religiously elevated, “god-like” status that he assigns to them.
Alan knows that his father is highly critical of his and Dora’s shared religious devotion. Frank Strang’s disapproval of this relationship can be connected to his own vision of religion, which is infused with sexuality. For example, Frank refers to the “religious pictures” that Alan likes as “real kinky ones” and to religion as “bad sex” (28). His reference to “sex/religion” as “bad” can be read as a condemnation of Alan and Dora’s close relationship, which is corrupted incestuously by the sexual overtones of religion. The “incestuous” bond can also be inferred from Frank’s reluctance to discuss sex with his son, while Dora offers her son a religious, “spiritual” view of sex (28).
Overtly Oedipal scenes can be found in scenes that depict Alan’s relationship with his father. For example, Alan is “hysterical” when his father violently removes his “reproduction of Our Lord on his way to Calvary” picture; but Alan recovers when the picture is replaced by the image of a horse. The removal of the religious image can be read as a Freudian “castration” scene, since Frank Strang is effectively attacking the religious connection between Dora and Alan. The substitute picture also explains Alan’s transfer of religious devotion from Biblical characters to horses. Interestingly, Frank’s extreme act does not finish or resolve Alan’s Oedipal complex; instead, Alan finds a way to continue his forbidden desires by substituting religion with horses. Frank’s attack/castration of Alan’s shared religious devotion with his mother results in Alan rebelliously transferring this “incestuous” devotion to horses.
This exchange of one fixation for another can also be read in Alan’s rewriting of Biblical “Geneology” with references to imagined horses (46). The names that Alan assigns to these horses are significant because they reference parts of the body along with sexualized acts (“Flankus and Spankus”) (46). A related “castration” sequence can be found in this scene as well, when Frank interferes and abruptly ends Alan’s chanting with a “cough,” thereby terminating the pleasure that Alan derives from it (47).
Most notably, however, is the scene where Frank Strang forcibly removes the six-year-old Alan from a horse. Alan confesses to Dysart the sense of “power” that he experienced when riding the horse (43). This power is described in sexualized terms when Alan states that, “There was sweat on my legs from his neck. The fellow held me tight, and let me turn the horse which way I wanted...” (43). The sexual power Alan experiences on the horse can be connected to the “horse story” that Dora was reading to Alan at this same age, a reflection of the mother/son bond. Alan recalls that, “suddenly I was on the ground, where Dad pulled me. I could have bashed him…” (43). This scene pointedly reflects the implications of the Oedipal complex in the hostility between father and son and the son’s desire for sexual power.
Alan’s Oedipal fantasy is realized when, as a teenager, he and Nugget enter the “place of Ha Ha” (67). This scene is highly sexualized with descriptions of Alan “mounting” Nugget (69) along with his use of “The Ark of the Manbit,” which prolongs “it” (68). This “it” can be read as the sexual gratification that Alan experiences when he rides Nugget. Alan’s statement that “His neck comes out of my body” reveals how Nugget becomes a “phallic symbol” that Alan appropriates (70). This key description can be analyzed in a way similar to critic Doreen Fowler’s Freudian and Lacanian analysis of Faulkner’s Sanctuary. In the case of Equus, Nugget fills the role of a Lacanian “phallic symbol” in opposition to the strict Oedipal guideline of a “father.” Alan is appropriating the phallic authority not from his father, though as we see later, the father is still present in the “eyes” of the horses. For Alan, sexual power is derived from the riding of the horse.
Alan’s naming of this field as the “place of Ha Ha” can be read in two ways. One way describes the subversive joy that he experiences in the playing out of his Oedipal fantasy, but another interpretation could be a mocking laughter that is directed toward the father, since Alan has been able to undermine Frank’s authority and gratify his own desire.
Alan’s ritualistic chanting and riding of Nugget are repeated behaviors that can be placed in another Freudian model, that of “the pleasure principle.” Freud writes, “At the outset [Freud’s grandchild] was in a passive situation-he was overpowered by the experience [of his mother’s repeated departures]; but, by repeating it [with toys], unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took an active part” (432). Alan’s riding of Nugget in the “place of Ha Ha” can be read in a similar way. It becomes Alan’s own attempt to assert control over the painful memory of Frank yanking him off of a horse when he was young.
Alan’s Oedipal complex experiences a shift, however, when he and Jill see Frank at an adult theater. Rather than seeing his father as the threatening, powerful figure that has “castrated” him repeatedly, Alan realizes that he and his father are alike in that he has a “prick” and does his own “secret things at night” (Shaffer 96-7). It is significant that Alan had “never thought about [this]” until now (96). In contrast to the traditional Oedipal complex where the son identifies with his father and submits to patriarchal authority in order to evade “castration,” Alan rebels further against the authority that is imposed by the father.
When Alan is inside the barn/Temple with Jill, his subconscious Oedipal desires affect him drastically. Interestingly, Jill confesses to Alan that she too has perceived horses as a sexual “substitute” (89). In this scene, however, Jill becomes a substitute for the mother figure in the Oedipal triangle and the “Him” who is watching Alan and Jill have sex is Frank, the “father” whose authoritative gaze is expressed through the eyes of the horses in the stable. Alan’s father makes him feel powerless because of the repeated “castrations” that he is forced to endure. Alan’s frustration stems from the unavoidable fact that his father always “sees” him. Whether Alan is on a horse, chanting in his room, or sneaking into a theater with Jill, his father consistently undermines his efforts to assert himself sexually.
Alan’s conflation of his father’s strict authority, the patriarchal “eyes” that monitor his every subversive move, and the “castration” scene that has most recently played out in Alan’s inability to complete the sex act with Jill are what drives him to blind the stable horses. This blinding scene, which calls to mind the blinding scene in Oedipus the King, is Alan’s final, violent attempt to free himself from the constant judgment and subjection that are a part of the Oedipal complex. Peter Shaffer does an extreme rewriting of Freud’s concept here because Alan never recognizes or submits to his father’s absolute authority, a recognition that is described as instinctive in the traditional Oedipal complex. Instead, Alan fights to subvert this authority to the point of committing a violently criminal act.
Equus does not offer Alan’s Oedipal complex a “successful” resolution, which would involve his submission and assimilation into society. Dysart’s analysis of Alan’s isolated life and his lack of socialization can be read as contributing to this inability to defer to his father and to integrate himself into a functioning, well-ordered society, since Alan has never been given any real concept of this society and how it works (79).

Works Cited

Fowler, Doreen. “Faulkner’s Return to the Freudian Father: Sanctuary Reconsidered.” Modern Fiction Studies 50.2 (Summer 2004): 411-434. Project MUSE. Web. 6 March 2010.

Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Massachusettes: Blackwell, 2004. 431-437. Print.

Shaffer, Peter. Equus. New York: Scribner, 2005. Print.

Annotated Articles

Buchanan, Brad. “Oedipus in Dystopia: Freud and Lawrence in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.” Journal of Modern Literature 3.4 (Summer 2002): 75-89. Project MUSE. Web. 6 March 2010.
Brad Buchanan’s 2002 article, “Oedipus in Dystopia: Freud and Lawrence in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,” argues the influences that the Oedipus complex and D.H. Lawrence had upon Huxley’s text (76). Buchanan asserts that the futuristic “utopia” portrayed in Brave New World attempts to vanquish the Oedipus complex in order to establish “social stability” (76). In the society presented to us by Huxley, “strong feelings” are discouraged, often interpreted as being “incestuous,” and individuals are placed in a state of existence that mimics the “womb/decanter” in an attempt to proactively eliminate the potential neurosis that might desire a return to this womb (77).
The Oedipus complex also comes into play, according to Buchanan, in regards to the novel’s portrayal of fathers, where John the Savage attempts to murder Popé, a father figure, and figuratively “kills” his own biological father by “addressing” him in “public” (78).
Buchanan argues that John the Savage represses all sexual desire in an effort to “[exorcise] the unconscious incestuous demons that plague him” (79). Buchanan aligns John’s “Victorian” manner of sexual repression with Huxley’s real-life views and Freud’s own argument for sexual repression in Civilization and its Discontents (80-1).
Buchanan also points to Huxley’s criticism of “Tragedy” as a “genre,” stating its inability to reveal the “Whole Truth” of a story along with the fact that John the Savage’s “tragic vision of reality” represents an “oversimplification” of Huxley’s take on “the complexities of modern life” (82).
Next, in terms of religion, Buchanan notes the similarity between Freud’s view of the “oceanic feeling” which references the negation of a collective whole with Huxley’s own emphasis on individuality and the minimizing of the “oceanic feeling” (83).
Buchanan also explores the role that D.H. Lawrence played in Huxley’s writing of Brave New World (84). Buchanan cites an essay written by Huxley on Lawrence where Huxley refutes the imposition of the Oedipus complex on Lawrence’s personal life that was made by many critics (85). Huxley later concedes, however, that critics like John Middleton Murry who made this assertion could be somewhat correct because of the real-life relationship between Lawrence and his parents. Buchanan also points to the parallels between Lawrence’s wife, Frieda, and Brave New World’s Linda, along with similarities between Lawrence and John the Savage (88).
In closing, Buchanan states that Huxley does not attempt to debunk the Oedipus complex as a psychoanalytic theory in Brave New World, but instead uses it “as a weapon in his satirical attack on the mores of modern life and on its utopian fantasies” (89).

Fowler, Doreen. “Faulkner’s Return to the Freudian Father: Sanctuary Reconsidered.” Modern Fiction Studies 50.2 (Summer 2004): 411-434. Project MUSE. Web. 6 March 2010.

Doreen Fowler’s 2004 article, “Faulkner’s Return to the Freudian Father: Sanctuary Reconsidered,” asserts that “the texts of [Faulkner’s] novels reveal a persistent, even obsessive, engagement with Freudian motifs” (412). Fowler focuses on Sanctuary and the Freudian concept of “the primal scene” (412). Fowler’s argument centers around her attempt “to read the narratives of Freud, Lacan, and Faulkner as analogous texts and to propose that Faulkner’s representation of the origin story revises the phallocentric biases of Freudian and Lacanian theory” (413). In Sanctuary, the Oedipal scene is located within the inhabitants of the Old Frenchman’s Place, who constitute the “family,” and the “sexual conquest [of Temple] denotes ascension to the father’s position” (415). In this scene, Popeye fulfills the role of the “father,” Temple “is the daughter-substitute for the desired mother,” and Tommy is the child-witness to the sexual act of Temple’s rape in the primal scene (415). However, Fowler argues that Faulkner undermines the representation of the father as “invincible” in this primal scene due to the fact that, much later in the novel, the reader is alerted to the fact that Popeye is impotent and that he actually raped Temple Drake with a corncob (416). This representation is aligned with a Lacanian view of the “phallus” which replaces the position held by the Freudian “father” (418). This revises the concept of the phallus, according to Fowler, as “an always absent referent” that is replaced by “phallic substitutes” (424).
The Oedipal drive towards incest also comes into play when the reader learns the details of the rape through Horace Benbow, whose projections of these details upon an image of his stepdaughter, Little Belle, relates the “desire for incest” (420-1).
Fowler also discusses the lynching in Sanctuary as a primal scene (422). Fowler argues that characters like Lee Goodwin and Horace Benbow, both of whom are white, are racialized through their “black doubles,” “the doomed black man in the next cell” and Popeye (who is white but described as “black”), respectively (422-3). Fowler argues that the symbolic “phallic father,” represented by the mob-like townspeople in Sanctuary, maintains the racial and “(patriarchal) order” that is challenged in the text (424).
Lastly, Fowler examines “Popeye’s execution” and “Goodwin’s lynching” as primal scenes (425). She states that, like the previous examples, the “phallic authority” of the town is reinforced through their executions (425).

Poland, Warren S. “Oedipal Complexes, Oedipal Schemas.” American Imago 64.4 (Winter 2007): 561-565. Project MUSE. Web. 6 March 2010.

Warren S. Poland’s 2007 article, “Oedipal Complexes, Oedipal Schemas,” questions whether Freud’s Oedipal complex is the key to “defining an individual’s character” or if it “[excludes] vast areas of human experience” (561). Poland seeks to resolve the disparity between individual experience and a “generalization” like the Oedipal complex (561). Poland finds the answer in a quote by Freud, which states that, “the simple Oedipus complex is by no means its commonest form, but rather represents a simplification or schematization” (562). Thus, Poland finds his answer in ascribing the term “oedipal complex” to individuals and “oedipal schema” to the generalized concept that we have traditionally associated with the Oedipal complex.
Next, Poland argues that Oedipus’s pronouncement, “The hand that struck me was none but my own,” is connected to the Freudian concept of “partial free will…a will that has choices even as it is constrained by inevitabilities” (563). Poland asserts that the forces within us can be partially controlled, thus “the possibility of therapeutic psychoanalysis was born” (563-4).
In closing, Poland cites and supports Loewald’s 1979 paper, “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex,” which states that Oedipus complexes are not resolved once, but are instead dealt with throughout life in a “movement toward individuation and autonomy” (564-5).

Reed, Michael D. “The Female Oedipal Complex in Maurice Sendak’s Outside Over There.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 11.4 (Winter 1986-87): 176-180. Project MUSE. Web. 6 March 2010

In his article, “The Female Oedipal Complex in Maurice Sendak’s Outside Over There,” Michael D. Reed uses the female version of Freud’s Oedipal complex to analyze a story which has “puzzled” critics (176). Reed focuses on the relationship between Ida, the protagonist, and her father, who has “gone out to sea” (176). Reed uses “Freud’s concept of polymorphous perversity” to explain how “a male author [can] write a story that expresses a female psychoanalytic fantasy” (176). This concept states that every individual contains all “sexual drives” before they eventually become aware of their own distinct gender; hence, they are able to draw upon that early knowledge to write stories from the perspective of the opposite sex (176). Reed follows critic Norman Holland’s “model,” which states that texts are able to successfully obscure embedded Oedipal desires and that “symbols, images, [and] characters” need to be analyzed to locate these hidden aspects (177). Reed states that Ida fits the model of an Oedipal character in “the desire for the father, the desire to replace the mother and have sexual relations with him, the desire for a baby from the father, and the hostility and jealousy toward the mother” (177).
Reed also points to textual illustrations that depict both phallic objects, like the mast of a ship, and “female genitals,” represented by “sunflowers” (178). The positioning of these illustrations represents Ida’s recognition that she is female along with her movement towards this gender identity and away from the male (178).
Reed further argues that Ida’s female Oedipal fantasy is fulfilled during her search for her stolen younger sister (178). In this quest, Ida encounters a goblin-birthing scene, where Reed states that Ida symbolically replaces her mother and has her father’s “babies” (179). Ultimately Ida and her family are successfully reunited, and Reed asserts that this female Oedipal fantasy is effectively shrouded in a story that superficially asserts “that one should obey one’s father , and then, everything will turn out well” (179).

Rudnytsky, Peter L. “Oedipus and Anti-Oedipus.” World Literature Today 56.3 (Summer 1982): 462-70. Project MUSE. Web. 6 March 2010.

Peter L. Rudnytsky’s 1982 article, “Oedipus and Anti-Oedipus” argues in favor of “the Oedipus myth” (462), which had been facing challenges. Rudnytsky addresses three works which comprise what he terms “the unholy trinity of ‘anti-Oedipus’” (467), analyzing and refuting their claims. These works are Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,” René Girard’s “Violence and the Sacred,” and Sandor Goodhart’s “…: Oedipus and Laius’ Many Murderers.”
Rudnytsky cites several problems with Deleuze and Guattari’s argument. Firstly, Rudnytsky asserts the extremity of the title, “Anti-Oedipus,” as revealing “a negative and sheerly destructive purpose” (462). Deleuze and Guattari, according to Rudnytsky, argue against the “universality” inherent in Freud’s Oedipus complex in favor of “fragments” and “partial objects” which make up “the production of desire” (463). They state that, “Schizophrenia as a process is the only universal” (463), an assertion which Rudnytsky uses to undermine their argument against any and all forms of “universalization” (463). Deleuze and Guattari also align themselves with Jung’s notion of dreams as being straightforward, as opposed to Rudnytsky’s belief in Freud’s notion of dreams as symbolic (464). Rudnytsky argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence on separating “paranoia and schizophrenia from ‘all familial pseudo etiologies’” is too extreme and that they should place their argument in supplement to the Oedipus complex rather than in stark opposition to it (464).
Next, Rudnytsky argues against René Girard’s rewriting of the Oedipus complex as “mimetic rivalry,” where the son/subject desires the mother/object only because the father/rival desires it (465). This rivalry results in “violence,” which makes the subject and rival each other’s “double,” since they desire the same object, and these subjects/rivals are also the “doubles” of all other subjects/rivals that came before them (467). Once again, Rudnytsky states that Girard’s argument should be positioned as complimenting rather than undermining the Oedipus complex (467).
Next, Rudnytsky attempts to debunk Goodhart’s argument that the original text of Oedipus shows that Laius was murdered by multiple men, a claim that would exonerate Oedipus (468). Rudnytsky refutes this claim, however, stating that Oedipus’s original audience knew of his guilt and that the play’s reference to “murderers” was meant to heighten the drama when Oedipus’s guilt was finally “revealed” (469).
Rudntysky closes with the assertion that the Oedipus complex is a “cultural touchstone” and that it “is destined to endure as long as people need to tell stories” (469).