Hamlet’s Displacement as a Recurrent Case in Cather’s A Lost Lady and Al Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land

Abstract

Freudian neurosis, despite being a psychological disorder rather than a literary topic, has been used in literature to conceptualise characters’ suffering. Freud contends that the suppression of desires due to hidden and unhidden causes leads to neurosis. Being unable to succeed in life, individuals feel neurotic and tend to displace their frustrations onto other persons or objects. Starting with the Renaissance, this article explores how displacement in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is tacitly approached and how this reaction has become a recurrent case in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady (1923) and Laila Al Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007). The article analyses the incentives of neurosis in each work, how these reasons lead to the onset of displacement and how literary works share relatively similar implications about displacement despite being about different issues.