A PSYCHOANALYSIS STUDY IN JOHN STEINBECK’S THE CHRYSANTHEMUMS
What makes a short story interesting is when the readers are persuaded to know exactly about the certain element of a fiction such as characters and certain symbols. Here, in John Steinbeck’s short story titled The Chrysanthemums, we are offered by such interesting element. The main character in John Steinbeck’s The Chrysanthemums is a woman named Elisa Allen who lost her happiness, frustrated her marital life and being barred from doing certain thing that she wish for and treated unequally by men.

According to Abrams, “character is a person presented in dramatic or narrative work who are interpreted by the reader as being endowed with moral and dispositional qualities that are expressed in what they say and what they do” (1981: 21). From this we can interpret ourselves what kind of person Elisa Allen from The Chrysanthemums is. But it is not enough to interpret the character by noticing what the character do or say, since John Steinbeck put chrysanthemums as Elisa Allen’s favorite flower and the most important, as the title of the short story. Eliade in Images and Symbols stated that “symbols reveal the deepest secret of human way of thinking and it is very important to help understanding the hidden secret of human being” (1961: 12). Chrysantemums must have some contributions about the character.

To start the analysis of John Steinbeck’s The Chrysanthemum, there is one approach will be applied. This approach is and psychoanalytic. The approach will apply on the fiction, The Chrysanthemum, is psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was first introduced by Sigmund Freud from year of 1900 until the year of 1940. Freud central hypothesis is that human behavior is determined in large part by unconscious motives. Freud himself is regarded as the explorer and mapper of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis can be applied in some subject: social science, history, biography, religion, and especially, literature. There