The oedipal conflict in Carlyle's "Frederick the Great"

Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Professor of English, University of Notre Dame

[Home —> Authors —> Thomas Carlyle —> Works —> Carlyle and the Search for Authority]

[Chapter 5, note 18, of the author's Carlyle and the Search for Authority, which the Ohio State University Press published in 1991. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright. indicates a link to material not in the original print version. GPL]

Previous commentary has noted the oedipal conflict in the first two volumes but assumed that it is resolved when Frederick submits to Friedrich Wilhelm. J. Rosenberg, for example, argues that the last four volumes lack the coherence that this theme gives to the first two (163-65). My argument is that the father/son conflict persists in the last four volumes, which fail for formal rather than thematic reasons.

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