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“On The Gull’s Road” by Willia Carter                                   Psychoanalytic Theory

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“On The Gull’s Road” by Willia Carter                                   Psychoanalytic Theory

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”On the Gull's Road”, by Willa Cather explores the theme of hidden desire and how that shapes identity, reflecting her connection with her real-life forbidden love.

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Aboard the Germania a steamboat

Mid-Atlantic during the turn of the 20th century

"Upon boarding my steamer at Genoa (Italy)...The boat was thinly peopled, even for a July crossing" (1)

The setting is also the Atlantic ocean, the romantic waves stimulated the wavering love between the main characters.

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What caused the narrator's long term infatuation with Mrs. Ebbling?

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What caused the narrator's long term infatuation with Mrs. Ebbling?

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Falling in love with someone due to frequent interaction because of close proximity.

The narrator might of taken a liking to Mrs. Ebbings because of their frequent interactions during their voyage across the Atlantic in a sparse population

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This is a semi-precious stone composed of lazurite (blue) & pyrite (gold)

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"The sea before us was so rich and heavy and opaque that it might have been lapis lazuli. It was the blue of legend, simply; the color that satisfies the soul like sleep." (3)

The author is in a romantic state of mind, this idyllic description of the sea proves that your state of mind can be greatly influenced by his surroundings.

"The water was bright and blue, but so cold the the breath of it penetrated one's bones, as if the chill of the deep under-fathoms of the sea were being loosed upon us." (5)

Here we being to see the ocean is describes as cruel and punishing, much like the reality that the love affair will soon turn out to be.

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The narrator goes through the five stages of grief as he grapples with unrequited love from the married and terminally ill Mrs. Ebbing.

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The narrator goes through the five stages of grief as he grapples with unrequited love from the married and terminally ill Mrs. Ebbing.

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Denial

“Mrs. Ebbling told me that she and her husband would be five days in the  docks  in  New  York  and  then  return  to  Genoa,  I  was  not disturbed, for I did not believe her... I heard an American lady say that she (Mrs. Ebbings) watched it (the ocean) like one who is going to die, but even that did not frighten me: I somehow felt that she had promised me to live.” (4)

Anger & Bargaining

”I was too sore and angry to think. I leaned toward her, holding the arm of her chair with both hands, and began anywhere. “You remember those two blue coasts out of Gibraltar? It shall be either one you choose, if you will come with me” (5)

Depression

“I fell back in my chair and my hands dropped at my side. I felt like a creature with its back broken.” (6)

Acceptance

“Was it her loveliness, I often ask myself, or her loneliness, or her simplicity, or was it merely my  own  youth?  Was  her  mystery  only  that  of  the  mysterious North  out  of  which  she  came?” (1)

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“He has had his disappointments… He has more to complain of than I have, and yet he bears with me. I am grateful to him, and there is no more to be said.”

Mrs. Ebbling’s character is shaped by emotional restraint and duty. She convinces herself that her responsibility to her husband matters more than her own happiness because society expects her to be loyal and obedient. From a psychoanalytic view, her Superego (the moral, rule-following part of the mind) controls her Id (her hidden desires and emotions).

This self-denial mirrors the author Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s own life, as she also had to hide parts of her identity to survive in a world that judged women who broke social rules, showing how duty can silence truth.

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“we felt the throb of the Atlantic come and go, the thrill of the vast, untamed waters of that lugubrious and passionate sea.”

The sea mirrors the narrator’s emotions, showing his deep but controlled love for Mrs. Ebbling. The waves and tides reflect his internal struggle; his love is powerful and consistent but must stay hidden.

Through a psychoanalytic lens, this is displacement, where feelings that can’t be expressed directly are redirected into symbols in this case, the sea.

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Climactic Confession / Resistance Insight

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Climactic Confession / Resistance Insight

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At night on deck, he pleads with Mrs. Ebbling to run away with him, to choose a blue coast, to cast aside constraints. She resists, invoking her illness and the impossibility of starting over.

She says, “I thought you knew … that I am too ill to begin my life over … we have nothing to do with giving or withholding … It is a wild thing that sings in us once and flies away.”

Psychoanalytic insight: Here is tension between conscious desire and the limits of reality. He is urging a bold resolution, the social bounds, the moral/psychic constraints. Her resistance speaks to internal limits and reveals a conflict between longing and acknowledgment of mortality and constraint.

In the section where he confronts her at night, pleading for her choice, and she responds about illness, life, and love.

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Plot moment: The narrator begins by describing the red‑chalk drawing of Alexandra Ebbling in his study and how a young painter’s interest in it prompts the narrator to finally recount the story he has never told before.

Psychoanalytic insight: The narrator has repressed this story for twenty full years, the silence is deafening and he avoids confronting his inner feelings. However, his feelings reawaken when asked by a young painter.

The opening paragraphs, especially the lines “I have never told the story … the beautiful woman on the wall … has spoken to no one but me” (beginning)

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Parting, Gift, and Death Symbol, Mourning, and Unfinished Desire

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Parting, Gift, and Death Symbol, Mourning, and Unfinished Desire

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Plot moment: On the last day when the ship docks, Mrs. Ebbling gives him a small box, She then vanishes. Later, he learns she died.

Inside the box are 3 items (a letter, hair, dried flowers, shells) symbols of memory and longing.

Psychoanalytic insight: The gift-box is a container for the repressed. It holds symbolic residue of the relationship and desire. The narrator's holding onto it even unopened signals unresolved grief and the inability to integrate the emotional experience fully. Her death makes the desire eternal, fixed in memory, unfulfilled. Mourning is incomplete.

Final sections, especially the parting scene and the revelation of her death, and what is in the box.

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Cather might of been considered a queer woman in the early 20th century; being an out lesbian was frowned upon. Although we can not speak for Cather, yet it is well documented she had a partner, Edith Lewis. we can infer that "On the Gull's Road" might be reflections of her internal struggles, she was not able to live freely and openly with the her love partner.

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One big challenge was to properly understand psychoanalytic theory and properly apply it to many pivotal parts of the story.

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The ocean like Mrs. Ebbings is mercurial, as the narrator comes to terms with her impending death. Yet her hair will prove to be everlasting like the love her feels for her.

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“Of the sea we talked, for it was the substance of Mrs. Ebbling’s  story.  She  seemed  always  to  have  been  swept  along by ocean streams, warm or cold.” (3)

“Pale, like sad memories. The water had faded, and the thin, tepid sunshine made something tighten about one’s heart” (5)

“(a vine) that is very like your hair. It seems to be growing while one looks at it, and it twines and tangles about itself and throws out little tendrils in the wind.” (4)

“I sat down and watched her hair grow more alive and iridescent in the moisture.” (5)