cases of female hysteria reported throughout Freudian literature. In Part 4, The White Hotel shifts to a more straightforward third-person account of the adult Elisabeth, a minor opera star of Polish Catholic and Russian Jewish extraction, whose troubled childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood in a disastrous first marriage are resolved when she marries a longtime friend and fellow singer and settles in Kiev. Part 5 describes the widowed Elisabeth's last train ride, with her stepson Kolya, to what they believe will be Palestine but what turns out to be Babi Yar, an early killing place of the Holocaust. Part 6 functions as an epilogue, set in a fantasy displaced persons' camp, which appears to contain the encounter of the spirit of Elisabeth with the spirits of various family and friends who affected her psychoemotional development. It is in this setting that Elisabeth's unquiet spirit appears to achieve something like closure with, or at any rate explanation and understanding of the psychoemotional insecurities of the Significant Others of Elisabeth's life.
That the character of Elisabeth involves application of the Freudian structural hypothesis is apparent in the fact that Elisabeth's life is framed by a constant push-pull of body, mind, emotion, and manifest action. Chiefly, this inheres in the sexual tension and repression in most of Elisabeth's life occasioned by an early-childhood trauma and disaffection with her father, as against a search for an emotional safe haven. Elisabeth's trauma is complex and ambiguous, traceable to both the repressed memory of encountering her partially nude mother having sex with her uncle in one instance and with her aunt and uncle in another instance, and to a long-unexplained loss of her mother at age five. It turns out that Elisabeth's mother had died, with her uncle, in a fire at a white hotel in Budapest where they had had an assignation. Doubtful of his paternity, embarrassed by and anxio...