Psyche Read Free Page A

the word holds a profound significance for her never wavers. She accepts the other names she is given only as a matter of necessity or as a function of familiarity, as when she answers to “Maggie” at school, to “Rosalie” at Oliver’s restaurant, or to Bel’s affectionate diminutive, “kid.” For years, she is condemned to spell rather than pronounce her own name, a limitation symbolic of the lack of information she, as victim of a kidnapping, has about herself and her personal history. Psyche’s gradual understanding of the name’s pronunciation and implications seems, at first glance, to emphasize the way in which the self develops over time and is shaped by experience, rather than springing into existence fully formed. Such a privileging of process is consistent with Brett’s own emphasis on the importance of taking into account “growth and development” in order to understand the “real activity of the mind.” 18 However the novel itself emphasizes that Psyche both believes in and illustrates the way an individual’s personality can remain intact despite the vagaries of circumstance.
    Psyche also
fails to conform to stereotypes of the late 1950s in its direct focus on sexuality. The 1953 publication of
Sexual Behavior in the Human Femaleby
Alfred Kinsey et al focused public attention on the female libido, claiming that women were not different from men in seeking sexual satisfaction. Psyche’s natural and magnetic appeal to both men and women reinforces and underscores the link to Kinsey’s findings. Are there suggestions of lesbian sexuality in the sympathetic portrayal of Kathie, with her elite private school background and experiences of “an incessant warfare between mind and body” 19 and “strife that had torn her apart since adolescence,” 20 who seems to have an unrequited love for Bel and perhaps for Psyche as well?
    While the question of what shapes a person is a key theme, the novel’s plot revolves around a kidnapping. Modern kidnapping in North America is often considered to begin with the 1874 abduction of four-year-old Charley Ross. The mystery of Ross’s disappearance was never solved and for the next fifty years men came forward claiming to be the “lost boy.” Lost boys were not uncommon in the late nineteenth century, in both real life and in fiction. The most famous fictional Lost Boys were probably those in J. M. Barrie’s
Peter Pan
. Historian Paula Fass describes “lost and found” newspaper ads for children and reports that tens of thousands of American children disappeared in late-nineteenth-century cities, taken into institutions, abandoned, murdered, or abducted. 21 The grieving parents of lost children worried not only about a child’s survival or safety and the abuse of innocence but also about how his or her identity would be altered by the experience. This concern for the effect on a child’s character can be seen in texts ranging from colonial “captivity narratives” to those describing the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst. It is very different from Psyche’s mother’s hope, indeed the belief she clings to despite reading opinions to the contrary, “that her child could have shaped her environment to her own inherent needs, rather than allowing her environment to be the principal factor in determining the kind of person she would be.” 22
    The idea of the “lost boy” was gradually replaced by the fear that children were vulnerable to harm not only from strangers and misfits but also from elite, successful, educated young men. Fass argues that by the 1920s kidnapping was the “ideal criminal form,” with the best example of this the 1924 high-profile kidnapping/murder of Bobby Franks by college students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. 23 The senselessness and brutality of the abduction and murder both shocked and fascinated