A Hotel and a Mind hold many Rooms

The play “Hotel Columbus” by Ricardo Monti is a play about a body guard for the president named Custer. He finds himself alone in in the presidential suite after a short time he finds that a transvestite named Sarah is in the room with him as well. They seem to know each other and they begin to discuss the relationship that they have. But they play roles, Sara that of a movie star and Custer plays the President. It is then reviled to the reader that Sara is in fact a manifestation of Custer’s guilt surrounding the suicide of his son that was caused after he came home and found his son in his dead mothers clothes. When Custer found him he brutally smashes his sons face directly after that the son shoots himself. The sons cause for suicide steams from complexities that arose within the course of the sons Oedipus complex
Freud states that “ The earliest affection of the girl-child is lavished on the father, while the earliest infantile desires of the boy are directed upon the mother. For the boy the father, and for the girl the mother, becomes an obnoxious rival”. When taking this into account and examining what lead up to the sons suicide and why he wore his mothers dress it can be determined that since the mother had passed on that the bond that they had that was created by his dependence upon her as a child would now have to be shifted upon his father, his rival becoming his savior. So this would undoubtedly change the dynamic of the Oedipus complex into an its female counter point the Electra complex where in this case the son had no rival and begin to fill the role of his mother. “His face all made up like a woman he smiled with those big red painted lips…You think I caught him in the act? No he was waiting for me…he looked exactly like his mother” By dressing like his mother waiting for his father to catch him and smiling upon his arrival it is relived that the son was happy with what he did and wanted to show it to his father that he had begun to fill the role of his deiced mother in the way most young girls according to Freud will try to with there fathers “An eight-year-old girl of my acquaintance, whenever her mother is called away from the table, takes advantage of her absence to proclaim herself her successor. ‘Now I shall be Mamma; Karl, do you want some more vegetables? Have some more, do,’” But in the case of a typical family dynamic the mother is there to stand in the way of the daughter. But because she is not present in the sons case and because of that the feelings of the son have shifted from the mother to the father he goes as far to physically fill that role using transvestitism. To the son this moment would have been fulfilling all his fantasies of his Electra complex. He had replaced his mother at this point within domestic roles “the kid would cook he had a knack for it” along with now he was physically filling that role by wearing her clothes and makeup he had achieved the role he had strived for. But when in response to this proud fulfilling moment Custer reacts with violence the complete opposite of the loving reaction he strived for it shatters all that his son has believed about there relationship. He rejected his son in every way even causing him physical pain to match the sons physical manifestation of the Electra complex. Rejecting the whole of the love the son had developed for him this shatters the son and then drives them to take his own life.