Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Julius Caesar 59
attach crucial importance to life’s monumental dimensions, to ancestry,
names, and statuary, the “public rendering of name” (Berry 79). Julius
Caesar opens with a tribunal reprimand delivered to the citizens for
decking “the images” with “Caesar’s trophies” (1.1.64,69). Still more
central to this connection is Calphurnia’s dream on the night before
Caesar’s assassination. The very presence in the play of Freud’s subject,
dream and dream interpretation, demonstrates its attraction for him
and might justify a connection of these two texts. In his wife’s dream,
as reported by Caesar, he figures as a statue:
She dreamt to-night she saw my statue,
Which like a fountain with an hundred spouts
Did run pure blood; and many lusty Romans
Came smiling, and did bathe their hands in it.
(2.2.76–79)
Calphurnia sees in the dream “warnings and portents/And evils
imminent” (80–81), while Decius cunningly offers an interpretation
more flattering to Caesar; he says it “Signifies that from you great
Rome shall suck / Reviving blood” (2.2.85–6). Calphurnia’s dream
foreshadows Caesar’s fate; after his death, Antony and the conspirators
alike emphasize the number of his wounds and the amount of
blood that is shed, and Antony’s use of Caesar’s body as a prop during
his funeral oration grants an iconic quality to the corpse. To reiterate
further the monumental aspect of the assassination, Antony describes
how Caesar died “at the base of Pompey’s statue / (Which all the
while ran blood)” (3.2.190–91). Statues represent the great figures of
the past; in a sense they are the patriarchal past, frozen into concrete
form, ancestry reified. So Freud’s dreamer, reacting to the “calamity”
of a bust he sees as inaccurate, is attempting to accommodate his
vision of his father. The dream expresses hostility, but despite the
compressed head and the facial wound, the father’s eyes are “clear”
(462), suggesting that the dreamer’s image of his father is intact, that
his anxieties are confronted and controlled.
After considering a fairly impersonal dream about constructing
and accepting an image of the dead father, Freud turns to a dream
of his own, about his father “play[ing] a political part,” interpreted as
that of a “presiding judge.” He reports seeing a portion of the dream