The Heroines’ Predicament of Self-differentiation in Celeste Ng’s Fictions

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.220306.046How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Celeste Ng; Self-differentiation; Everything I Never Told You; Little Fires Everywhere

Abstract

The new-generation Chinese American writer Celeste Ng has won many awards and praises for two novels Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere. Both novels with a recurring family motif, begin with the suspense of a missing girl and narrate the self-differentiation process of Lydia and Izzy across the double shackles of the family and social system. Drawing on the concept Differentiation of Self in Bowen’s Family Systems Theory, this present paper is designed to discuss the self-differentiation process of the two gone girls Lydia and Izzy, especially the predicament of individual self-differentiation under different spatial forms. The results indicate a panorama of the dysfunctional family system and dominant social discourse they live in, and reveal a fact that the self-differentiation level is deeply influenced by the family of origin and the mainstream environment, thus discussing the possibility to reconstruct self under the double shackles for individuals.

Copyright

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Minyao Tian
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/03/30
TI  - The Heroines’ Predicament of Self-differentiation in Celeste Ng’s Fictions
BT  - Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Inter-cultural Communication (ICELAIC 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 291
EP  - 298
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.220306.046
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.220306.046
ID  - Tian2022
ER  -