Hilda Reilly's Blog: The Writing of Guises of Desire - Posts Tagged "klimt"

As I neared the end of my novel, the need to decide on a title grew pressing. I had already been through several working titles: Bertha P (unlikely to attract attention, in fact, guaranteed not to); The Story of Bertha P (not much better); A.K.A. Anna O (well, I suppose the name Anna O is more recognizable than Bertha P, but not widely so, and there was also the problem of punctuation: should it be aka, AKA, a.k.a., A.k.a or A.K.A?).

Then the phrase The Various Guises of Desire came to me out of the blue. Now this I really liked. Pleasingly euphonious, with subtle hints of eroticism; perhaps the thinking woman's Fifty Shades of Grey. But could I be accused of misrepresentation? After all, my novel isn't a bodice ripper.

I didn't think so. In fact, it seemed to me highly apt. I don't agree with a lot of Freud's thinking but I do believe he was onto something with his ideas about what he unfortunately termed 'polymorphous perversity', which looms large in my version of the Bertha Pappenheim story. It also chimed with my thesis that Bertha's absence states were associated with a form of temporal lobe epilepsy and that during them she experienced states of mystical rapture.

I put it to the vote on my blog and on facebook. To my disappointment, no one came out in favour of The Various Guises of Desire. On the other hand, several people suggested Guises of Desire as a better alternative.

In the meantime, I had been toying with other ideas.

The Viennese Patient. Catchy enough but what about its significance? Bertha Pappenheim was undoubtedly Viennese - or was she? Her mother was born in Germany and her father in Hungary - but so too were most of the patients of early psychoanalysis. Bertha does not stand out particularly by virtue of her Viennese-ness. Once I'd realised this, the title lost its attraction for me.

I next considered Becoming Anna O. Incorporating Anna O into the title would make it meaningful to a wider range of readers and throw it up more frequently on Google searches. Then I discovered a book titled Becoming Anna. It's not a good idea to give a book a title which is the same as, or similar to, that of another book. Plus, this title was open to the same arguments made against the following one, suggested by a blog reader:

From Bertha P to Anna O.

I thought carefully about this one before deciding that it only covered part of the story. Yes, it summarises Bertha's passage from normal (for the time, place and social setting) young woman to patient treated for a multi-stranded medical condition as depicted by Breuer. But the novel goes beyond that, postulating more than is suggested in the case study and ending when Bertha is nearing the end of her later, and highly successful, professional life. I didn't want her identity to be subsumed into that of the case study.

At the same time I was thinking about the kind of artwork I'd like to see on the cover. That, along with the title, is crucial to getting a book noticed.
The first idea that came to mind was Klimt, a Viennese artist of about the same period as Bertha. I started looking at his paintings. Much as I liked them I felt that they were too well known and too 'strong' in a way which would risk eclipsing the image of the novel itself. Then I came across his sketches. I knew at once that here I would find something which encapsulated the essence of my story. Most of all it was the eroticism conveyed by many of his drawings of naked or semi-nude young women. It struck me that this, above all, is what my novel is about. I was reminded of writer Terri Marie's advice on choosing a title, that it was awaiting discovery and when recognized would instill you with confidence and catalyse the energy of the book - 'like a light shining through the window'. So it was with the Klimt sketches.

I hadn't realised until this point how important the undercurrents of eroticism in my novel are. I had seen it more as simply a many-faceted story. Now I could see that the main driving force is the steadily increasing erotic charge (albeit not always in guises which we would immediately recognise) which leads to the dramatic culmination.
The whole process of searching for title and artwork was like subjecting the content of my novel to study under a microscope. It homed in on what it is principally about, clarified it and enabled me to sum it up.

And in the end I went with the crowdsourced option:
Guises of Desire