Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Contemporary Education, Social Sciences and Humanities (ICCESSH 2019)

Lydia's Identity Crisis in Everything I Never Told You

Authors
Yuan Shen, Jinyue Zhai
Corresponding Author
Yuan Shen
Available Online July 2019.
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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Volume Title
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Contemporary Education, Social Sciences and Humanities (ICCESSH 2019)
Series
Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research
Publication Date
July 2019
ISBN
978-94-6252-752-2
ISSN
2352-5398
DOI
10.2991/iccessh-19.2019.250How to use a DOI?
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/).

Cite this article

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  -