SOURCE: "Dreaming of Death: Love and Money in The Merchant of Venice," in The Dream and the Text: Essays on Literature and Language, edited by Carol Schreier Rupprecht, State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 133-56.

In the following essay, originally written in 1991, Stockholder reads The Merchant of Venice as the dream of Portia's dead father in order to unravel the play's psychological and social concerns with wealth and sexual desire.

Psychoanalytic criticism over the years has generated a refined understanding of the ways literature renders the complex, dynamic organization of human emotion. However, there are two persistent grounds on which most forms of psychoanalytic literary practice have been censured. The first is that they detach literary portrayals of human complexities from the social and political institutions, conscious values, and cognitive systems in which literature embeds them. In concentrating on a presumed latent content, psychoanalytic criticism tends to...