Lydia's Identity Crisis in Everything I Never Told You

DOI

10.2991/iccessh-19.2019.250How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Celeste Ng; Everything I Never Told You; identity crisis

Abstract

Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You narrates a tragedy that occurred in a cross-ethnic family in the 1960s. This paper focuses on Lydia's social, family and campus life environment on the strength of Erickson's theory of self-identity and personality to analyze Lydia's identity crisis. Racism and feminist movement confused Lydia's sense of self-belonging and self-values, which gave rise to her identity crisis. Parents' exceptional expectations of Lydia and her excessive dependence on her brother also caused Lydia's self-differentiation and self-unity obstacles, resulting in her identity crisis. Finally, with Erickson's self-identity theory, this paper analyzes Lydia's obstacles to self-cognition for abnormal heterosexual emotion and alienated peer relationship. The exploration of Lydia's identity crisis will help further interpret the theme of race, gender and self-cognition revealed in the novel.

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yuan Shen
AU  - Jinyue Zhai
PY  - 2019/07
DA  - 2019/07
TI  - Lydia's Identity Crisis in Everything I Never Told You
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Contemporary Education, Social Sciences and Humanities (ICCESSH 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1122
EP  - 1126
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/iccessh-19.2019.250
DO  - 10.2991/iccessh-19.2019.250
ID  - Shen2019/07
ER  -