Putting Myra into Orders: Locating the Operations of the Lacanian Orders in Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy

Abstract

Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy features Myra Henshawe as its central character, whose romantic relationship affects her overarching relationship with material wealth. Critical works focusing on these two concepts – wealth and love – to analyze this novel is not difficult to find but such critical lenses never incorporated Jacques Lacan’s notions regarding the human psyche. This paper intends to provide insight into this opening by analyzing the character Myra Henshawe in light of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories. The purpose is to find out how different stages of Myra’s life correspond with specific Lacanian orders, i.e. – the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the ‘Real’. Thus, the theoretical framework is provided by Jacques Lacan’s theory of the three orders and some conceptual understandings on the Mirror Stage, the Desire of the Mother, the Name-of-the-Father, the ‘objet petit a’, lack, desire, ‘jouissance’ and the Death Drive aid in this regard as well. The discourse of My Mortal Enemy has been analyzed and the findings have been viewed in light of such theoretical and conceptual understandings to assess the nature of Myra’s dysfunction as an individual within society. This paper’s investigation of My Mortal Enemy’s Myra Henshawe through the Lacanian orders shows that – wealth & romantic love structure her life into different segments, which if situated varyingly into the Imaginary and the Symbolic orders, engenders varying interpretations that serve as explanations for Myra’s gradually decreasing capacity to function in society, and how within these orders, Myra’s encounter(s) with the ‘Real’ can be specified, which sheds light on Myra’s traumas & her tendency to repetitively cycle back to such traumatic experiences and also further accounts for her dysfunction.