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The first chapter of Holland's book is the most important because it summarizes his position. Holland argues that Chaucer's Wife of Bath Tale, concerning a knight who must submit to the rule of women, has in addition to such conventional meanings as its mythic, its medieval, its modern, its Marxist meanings, another one, a psychoanalytic meaning which provides the primary psychic energy of which all the other meanings are transformed versions. “Meaning,” says Holland, “is not a statement but a process. The fear-if I do not submit to mother, she will castrate me-becomes in our conscious reading of the story the pleasure of submitting instead of coercing … The story ‘means' in that it transforms its unconscious fantasy into social, moral, intellectual and even mythic terms.”
At least two questions are raised by this kind of interpretation: Do in fact infantile fantasies power all our artistic reactions? Secondly, can we derive from them literary criticism which will illuminate the work? In order to answer these questions I will review two of Holland's more detailed analyses, that of Macbeth's speech beginning “Tomorrow and tomorrow” and that of Arnold's “Dover Beach” (pp. 110-125). I might add that both analyses have been praised by other reviewers of this book.
According to Holland, Macbeth's speech presents the reader with a buried metaphor, a metaphor of a child “going to bed” and being frightened by imaginings associated with watching “the sadistic, bloody violence of his parents in the struggle of love …” Holland says that the famous phrase “'Out, out, brief candle'!” becomes ambiguous if we consider possible phallic symbolism: it may be a command to withdraw the penis concealed in the sexual act or detumescent after.” Holland goes on to assert that the speech defends the child against his desire to