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"The Monkey's Paw" and Freud's three caskets theme.

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Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Other attributes of humanity, some not so bouncy as that impulse of optimism, abide also in that ribbed chamber, Pandora's box. We will open the casket only a crack, just now.

W.W. Jacobs' famous story is a sophisticated tale in a lengthy tradition of wish fulfillment stories, such as genie-in-a-bottle fables, and other reality principle vs. pleasure principle dramatizations. In his 1913 essay, "The Theme of the Three Caskets," the sort of essay readers today find Jungian because of its emphasis on myth rather than an individual case analysis, Freud shows how the choice among three caskets (boxes) in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is a mythic remnant that appears in creative works and in the mind of man more generally in continual retransformations. Here is Freud's summary of the choices presented in that play, which we will compare afterward to three wishes.

The fair and wise Portia is bound at her father's bidding to take as her husband only that one of her suitors who chooses the right casket from among the three before him. The three caskets are of gold, silver, and lead; the right casket is the one that contains her portrait. Two suitors have already departed unsuccessful: they have chosen gold and silver. Bassanio, the third, decides in favor of lead; he thereby wins the bride, whose affection was already his before the trial of fortune. Each of the suitors gives reasons for his choice in a speech in which he praises the metal he prefers and depreciates the other two. The most difficult task thus falls to the share of the fortunate third suitor; what he finds to say in glorification of lead, as against gold and silver is little and has a forced ring. If in psychoanalytic practice we were confronted with such a speech, we should suspect that there were concealed motives behind the unsatisfying reasons produced. (Freud 79-80)

Portia is in the position of a Sleeping Beauty or glass-casketed Snow White. Time stand still while she awaits rescue from the tower of stasis, her prison of latency. Various men have chosen wrongly in a very important game, seemingly one of chance, whose felicitous outcome would win them Portia's fortune as well as her fair self. Freud's essay develops very wide applications from his interpretation of the meaning behind the seeming nonsense of this riddle game.

First, Freud explains that the choice is really between three women, not three caskets: the caskets are symbols he found reappeared, in his patients' and in others' dreams of the womb: "What is essential in woman" (Freud 81). Now a link is made from this comedy of Shakespeare's to a major tragedy. In King Lear, that aged monarch chooses to disown Cordelia, the youngest of his three daughters, "and divides the kingdom between the other two to his own and the general ruin. Is this not once more the scene of a choice between three women, of whom the youngest is the best, the most excellent one?" (81). Freud then observes that the theme of the three caskets, once perceived, is virtually ubiquitous. He found it repeated in the myth of Psyche and the fairy tale of Cinderella, as well as in the story of the choice that Paris makes between three goddesses which brings about the Trojan War. Freud offered a challenge: "Anyone who cared to make a wider survey of the material would undoubtedly discover other versions of the same theme preserving the same essential features" (82).

As others probably have, I've made such a list. (See my article in Lovecraft Studies 29.) Beneath...

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