B. The Revelation of Suwen’s Repressed Memories
Previously, Suwen’s characteristics are identified as artistic, conservative, and quiet. At this point, the writer focuses on the characteristics of Suwen that are
previously identified to be analyzed further considering the possibility of the repressed memories that Suwen possesses in her life.
The first characteristic of Suwen that is considered to have the possibility of repressed memories is as a quiet person. Suwen is a quiet person. She has a great
difficulty in expressing things through words. She never says or shares anything about her feelings to someone else. She chooses to remain silent in facing any hard
and painful situations. She also does not like conflict and argument. She always runs away from quarrel and confrontation. In this case, Suwen always leaves the
problems behind her. She never tries to fix the problems one by one. The problems of her life are left to be a pile of burden in her mind. The second characteristic of
Suwen that relates to the possibility of repressed memories is that Suwen is a kind of conservative person. She tends not to work and think outside the cultural and
socially acceptable things. She feels guilty whenever she tries to think about something that is forbidden by her race and family. In painting, for example, Suwen
always puts cultural values inside it. Because of her strong dedication on history, Suwen always wants to resurrect the story and the experience of history by putting
them into the painting in order to make them immortal. However, her dedication toward history brings her into an isolation. As what is discussed in the previous
part, Suwen has limited knowledge about things. It is obviously seen through her statements and answers of Nica’s questions. When they find fungi on their journey,
Suwen does not want to touch them because she thinks they are poisonous. But Nica tells her that fungi are harmless things. Suwen’s fear of touching the fungi is the
product of her lack of knowledge. Another related case is about Suwen and her lover, Mark Campbell. Suwen thinks and feels that their relationship should not be
developed because they are from different races. Suwen, who is Chinese, thinks that she cannot marry someone who is not Chinese. She thinks that she is supposed to
marry a man who is Chinese too. Although she has her own desire toward Mark, Suwen cannot break the rule. That is why she hangs up their relationship.
Seeing those characteristics of Suwen, the writer sees the possibility of the repressed memories possessed by Suwen. To be a conservative and quiet person,
who is shielded and isolated from the outside world, Suwen must have something that is secretly kept inside her mind. According to the point of view of
psychoanalyst, something that is kept in mind will anyhow try to seek the way out of the mind into a real form of action. This idea is well known as the idea of
repression as what is written in Barry’s book about Freud’s idea of repression that is defined as “…the ‘forgetting’ or ignoring of unresolved conflicts, unadmitted
desires, or traumatic past events, so that they are forced out of conscious awareness and into the realm of the unconscious” Barry, 2002: 97. Having the characteristics
as a conservative and quiet person, Suwen must have unresolved conflicts, unadmitted desires, or traumatic past events in her life. The following parts show
the life experiences that Suwen tries to repress deeply inside her mind. One of the unadmitted desires that Suwen has is shown when she is in
confrontation with her mother. Suwen is accused of not being filial. Her mother
demands her to be as what her mother wants. However, instead of making any attempts to defend herself or to fight back her mother’s words, Suwen chooses to
concentrate on her painting. … The thought of another confrontation with her mother filled her with
loathing. All her life, she had wanted to escape the clutches of the womb. Give back to her mother all the gratitude she wanted and then to have
nothing more to do with her Lim, 2003: 13. From the situation that is shown on the quotation above, Suwen has a desire
to be free. She thinks that children must not always become what their parents want. Suwen wants to live by her own, to be what she wants to be, not to be what the
others or her mother wants. All her life, Suwen has wanted to be free, to reach her dream, as is stated in the following quotation.
… Lifted by an inner music, impelled by a feverish restlessness, her hand had painted light and shadows, lines and shapes, colours and textures, her
strokes uneven and unplanned, her agitated spirit yearning for the fluidity of dispossession, rootlessness and loneliness. To be free to seek pure form.
Free to paint the canvas she was defining and to suffer the loneliness she was choosing Lim, 2003: 15.
Suwen’s mind is full of longing to be free, to be what she wants to be and
reach what she dreams, taking the consequences from what she chooses. But she keeps her desires in her mind.
Another desire that Suwen has is the sexual desire she has for Mark. Suwen has a special feeling with her mate, Mark Campbell. He has it for Suwen, too.
However, Suwen is not really sure about her feeling and choose to hang up the relationship between them. Suwen likes Mark. One thing that always bothers
Suwen’s mind is the thought that they come from different races. Suwen cannot go
on any further with her desire because she does not want to harm her ancestor’s rules. She is Chinese and Mark is not Chinese.
… She liked Mark, she quickly told herself. But she was afraid of her own irrational feelings. Once. Only once, she had allowed herself to imagine
what Mark might look like stripped of his attire. A white nude male, white as death, with a thick fat organ dangling between his white hairy thighs. And
at this point, she had turned resolutely away and stopped her mind from fantasising such nonsense Lim, 2003: 125.
From the quotation above, it is obvious that Suwen has sexual desire on
Mark, but she makes no attempt to make it real. Suwen, with her strong idea about racial rules, cannot fulfill her own desire. She has to deceive herself of being in love
with non-Chinese man. She makes an attempt to go in the fantasy of Mark, trying to feel her own desire. However, her strict way of thinking forbids it to go any
further. She, once again, keeps her desire deeply in her mind. She tries to ignore it and keeps it out of the reality.
Related to her unadmitted sexual desire, Suwen is questioning herself about the necessity of being conservative. She realizes that she has that desire, but she
always feels unsure to go to the new life and break the rule that she always hold tightly. From the following quotation, the sexual desire of Suwen is shown.
Most white woman, if not all, in matters of sexual equally merely wanted to be like men, treating their own sex organs like so many hands and feet, a
physical limb to thrust into a body or be thrust into by another body. God God God She was getting more and more prejudiced the more upset she
got She must stop. Simply stop thinking Lim, 2003: 302. Every time she thinks about sexual matters, a great complicated thought
comes to her mind and makes her annoyed. Naturally, a human being, even Suwen, has sexual desire. No one can deny that fact. But Suwen always depends on her idea
of being conservative. She always puts the rule of her race before anything. She
does not want to break the rule and harm the family’s name. Even for her own desire, she cannot think further to fulfill it. Her conservative way of thinking always
wins the debate inside herself. That’s why every time Suwen thinks about it makes her to feel uncomfortable.
Suwen’s other desire is related to her mate, Nica. She is significantly different from Suwen. Nica has supreme self-confidence. She can make so much
attraction to people around her. Suwen admires her very much. She wants to be an artist that is perfectly born like Nica.
Nica was the kind of artist Suwen wanted to be if she could ever resign from the college. Bold, frank, honest and utterly at ease with people, she had a
wide circle of artistic friends, art collectors and dealers. Everyone who had anything to do with the arts in Singapore seemed to know Nica. She was
one of those fortunate persons, born into the limelight, attracting people the way a candle attracted moths Lim, 2003: 65.
From the quotation above, it can be inferred that Suwen is Nica’s admirer.
She looks at Nica as a perfect figure of a great artist. Suwen wants to be like Nica someday. However, she has to keep it inside her mind. For the real life, Suwen
cannot be like Nica. She, Suwen, does not have that supreme self-confidence that Nica has. Her conservative thinking makes her desire of being like Nica left in the
pile of desires, to be only desire, not to be real. Suwen has unadmitted desires and unpleasant events in her life that she tries
to repress. The memory of unpleasant events and unadmitted desires that Suwen has will be buried deeply inside her mind. As what is stated in Freud’s idea of
repression that the repressed memories can be derived from the traumatic or unpleasant events that the character faced in the past time, Suwen is a character that
has such indication of repression. The repressed memoriess of Suwen cannot be
separated from her characteristics. Suwen’s characteristics have a contribution in determining the repressed memories. Suwen is identified as a conservative and
quiet person. She has a great difficult to say and share her feelings to someone else. She also often runs away from the conflict and argumentative situation. It is obvious
that a person with such characteristics tends to have repressed memories in hisher life.
The repression that Suwen has is produced when she tries to forget about the memory of the unpleasant events and to ignore her sexual desires. She chooses
to empty her mind when such kind of feelings or memories come instead of trying to let them out. Suwen can successfully manage her mind and eyes to think nothing
and to see nothing as she often does after she faces unpleasant events. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
This is the way of peace. Shanti. Shanti. Shanti.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing Lim, 2003: 17. The quotation above shows the moment when Suwen tries to calm down her
emotion. She thinks that by doing this she can ignore and forget the unpleasant feelings and memories she has in her mind. But this action only takes them out of
the mind for a while. They still remain in her unconsciousness. As what Matthew Hugh Erdelyi 2006: 504 states about Freud’s idea of repression that “there is no
guarantee that at a later juncture there might not be a return of the repressed”. In Suwen’s case, she may be able to keep the repression out of the consciousness. But
the repressed memory is not wiped out. It is still buried deeply inside the unconsciousness and there is possibility for the repression to come out of the
unconsciousness. The harder she tries to ignore them, the greater the repression she
builds in her unconsciousness. Related to this case, the ignorance or forgetting does not mean permanent loss or unavailability of the forgotten. Something that is
repressed, once it is freed from the task of repression, will bring the result of exaggerated obsession about what is repressed before Erdelyi, 2006: 506.
C. The Significance of Painting related to the Outcome of Suwen’s Repressed
Kategori