Cry of Absence Psychological Book

Cry of Absence

Psychological book review

Cry of Absence by Madison Jones features a protagonist that is in a state of conflict between her id, ego, and superego. A murder has been committed in the protagonist's small, Southern town. The victim was an African-American man. Thus, Hester Cameron Glenn is torn between her basest 'id' impulses, to avoid conflict and to satisfy her desires to remain in comfort and her higher desires to tell the truth, as her 'superego' desires to do.

At the beginning of the tale, Hester strikes the reader as an aloof, supposedly aristocratic member of the town's Southern gentry, and her sense of duty as a human being is infantile -- part of her id impulses, one might say, as they involve upholding her family's good name. But Hester Glenn's sense of social identity and her ego are tied to her familial legacy, of her family's name and the town's history, because that is her source of power in the town and in her current family structure. But when the supposedly uppity African-American man is killed in her town in a ritualistic fashion, Hester's ego, or sense of governing morality begins to develop in a different fashion. It comes into conflict with her infantile id's desires to merely experience pleasure, satisfy her family's needs, and to be gratified in a purely childish and material fashion. She feels she must come forward with what she knows because of her sense of duty and moral righteousness, showing the author Jones' belief in the intrinsic goodness of some aspects of Southern womanhood.

There is another superego element, too, however, to Hester's consciousness -- that of the superego, or governing morality of the town that tells her that blacks and whites must be forever divided. The title of the book suggests that there is a lacking, or an emptiness that must be filled for the woman in question because of this duality or conflict. Freud might call this an example of penis envy, or the need for a woman to be filled with the morality of her father, or later, the morality of the town. Human beings are in a state of void or lack, according to Freud, and wait to be filled with another, to temporarily satiate their desires.

But this book not only chronicles the main character's inner struggles with her divided sense of her own and her society's morality, but also the anxieties inherent in black and white relationships, in terms of sexuality between black and white women. Hester is afraid of Black male sexuality -- yet also fears that her own son, the extension of her self in Freudian identity constructs, her status or phallic symbol of power in the patriarchal society of the town, had a hand in killing the African-American man. To do what is right, she must cut herself off thus from her past, fatherly sense of identity and power, and her current sense of male autonomy -- cut herself off from both the protections of race and familial maleness.

The author seems to construct Hester's struggle not in general psychological terms, but in regional terms. The conflict between Blacks and White, and Black and White men and women, he suggests, is a particular Southern obsession in the way this struggle plays out. There is also an added sense of poignancy, as the South, a region sundered from the North during the Civil War, now causes Hester to be estranged from her son in a conflict of morality. Hester must defend a man who can bring her no social status, that of a deceased African-American, or stand by a man who has committed a horrific act, that of her son.