Competitiveness as Aggression: A Lacanian Reading of The Queen’s Gambit

Competitiveness is what drives the individuals to thrive. It has always been marked as one of the characteristics of successful people in the meta-modern world. However, it is labelled as a flawed design, woven with extreme emotions, which eventually leads to the destruction of self-worth. Competitiveness is also, in most of the cases, associated with aggression in occasions. As aggression takes different forms and is presented with different faces, the concept is categorised in ways that includes behavioural patterns which may appear as normal in societies. The present article aims to shed light on the relation between competitiveness and aggression in Walter Tevis’s Queen’s Gambit by the aid of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of aggression and its relation to competitiveness. The novel presents a suitable ground for this study as it is a bildungsroman focusing on the life of the protagonist, Elizabeth Harmon who is newly orphaned. As she is placed in an orphanage, she develops her drug addiction and later alcoholism, yet she becomes a chess champion and prodigy. By the end of this research, the concept of competitiveness has been labelled as passive aggressive, cold-blooded aggression which has germinated due to the lack of fulfilled desires in the protagonist along with jouissance acting as a substitute and catalysis of her active aggressive-destructive actions.