Manifestations of Repressed Desires in the Forty Rules of Love and Three Daughters of Eve

This paper examines how repressed desires surface in Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love (2010) and Three Daughters of Eve (2017). It reads both novels through Freudian psychoanalytic criticism and tests that lens against later revisions by Lacan, Klein, Chodorow, and Caruth. Drawing on Freud’s accounts of the unconscious and repression, the study asks how characters manage the gap between societal constraint and deeply buried yearning. It argues that dreams, strained mother-daughter bonds, and a mystical idiom are routes by which what cannot be acknowledged is disguised and returned. Dreams open onto fears and wish the characters cannot own, from Rumi’s longing for a companion to Peri’s nightmares of her imprisoned brother. Mother-daughter conflict in both novels shows unspoken resentment passing from one generation to the next, even when daughters vow to be different. In the Rumi and Shams narrative, the yearning for divine transcendence reads as the sublimation of a desire that religion, culture, and tradition forbid. By setting two temporally and culturally distant narratives side by side, the paper shows how Shafak treats repression as a force that shapes human behaviour, and where a Freudian reading needs later theory to stay faithful to the texts.