An Analysis of the Causes of Lydias Tragedy in Everything I Never Told You from the Perspective of Trauma Theory 创伤理论视角下《无声告白》中莉迪亚创伤成因的分析开题报告

 2023-04-11 10:48:10

1. 研究目的与意义（文献综述包含参考文献）

文 献 综 述1. Introduction1.1 Research Background The word trauma, originated from Greek, refers to an injury or a mental condition caused by severe shock. After the first World War, people began to pay great attention to the research on psychological trauma, which reached its peak after the Vietnam War. At that time, the research mainly focused on the hurt caused by the war, also called shell shock. Later, owing to various civil rights movements and womens liberation movements in the 1970s, the violence against women and children attracted the publics great attention, and trauma research appeared prosperously. Celeste Ng is a famous Chinese American woman writer in the United States, whose works have a profound reflection on the living conditions and family relations of ethnic minorities in American society.1.2 Celeste Ng and Everything I Never Told YouCeleste Ng was born in Pittsburgh, PA, which was once an industrial center of the United States. Her father was a physicist who worked for NASA, while her mother was a chemist who taught at Cleveland State University. Later, Ngs family moved to Shaker Heights, OH. It was its excellent schools as well as its racial integration that made her well-educated parents inhabit Shaker Heights. Thanks to the latter, Ng had a healthy childhood, though she has since learned that other communities are by no means guaranteed to be as progressive as Shaker Heights. As such, both the blatant and the subtle examples of racism come up in her books, which happened to either her, her friends, or her family members before. Her first novel, Everything I Never Told You (2014), was a New York Times bestseller, also praised as excellent first novel about family, love, and ambition by Los Angeles Times.Everything I Never Told You is the first novel of Celeste Ng, and takes six years. Set in 1970s Ohio, Everything I Never Told You opens with the revelation that the beloved middle child of a Chinese American family, is dead but her family doesnt know this yet. The missing teenager is Lydia. Her father James, born in Chinese, has been unable to integrate with the local community due to the illegal immigration in his childhood, while her mother Marilyn, a native American, has always been very assertive, compared with others girls of the same age, since she was quite young. However, Marilyn had children too early to finishing the study in college. With the eldest son and the second daughter born one after another, she was busy with the role of mother and tired of her repeated life day after day. Marilyn then ran away from home, which brought severe harm to her children. Later, James drove to find her and managed to persuade her to come. In order to please her coming-back mother, Lydia always answered yes to her mothers each question and requirement. At the same time, James always gave Lydia birthday gifts according to his preferences and encourage her to socialize more, which is not Lydia good at as well. Finally, after realizing that her brother Nathan, who had always kept her afloat, couldnt wait to leave home and was admitted to Harvard, Lydia drowned herself. Moving artfully among characters perspectives, the novel shows how Lydias mother, Marilyn, her father, James, and her siblings, Nathan and Hannah, each seek to unravel the mystery of her death and also depicts Lydia in the days leading up to her disappearance.1.3 The Theory of TraumaThe original notion of trauma, which can be traced back to a Greek word, means the physical wound that is caused by external forces. In the nineteenth century, many famous psychoanalysts applied trauma to psychology field. At the beginning of the 20th century, trauma is widely applied to literature as a critical method in literary studies. Cathy Caruth, who is a famous scholar in trauma study, defines trauma in her masterpiece Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History as an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the events in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena.2. Literature ReviewCeleste Ng is the second widely recognized Chinese American writer after Amy Tan, the author of the famous work The Joy Luck Club. Her novels explore a wide range of themes such as class, race, family and love. Everything I Never Told You is an example of the kind of work concerning the growing up theme of youth and its releasement fills the gap of Chinese American works in the mainstream literature of Europe and America. Scholars at home and abroad have already done research on this novel.2.1 Studies AbroadSince Everything I Never Told You came off the press, the novel has aroused abundant attention of the public, won high praise among readers and has been widely reported by a number of famous newspapers and magazines in the past few years.Some reports lay emphasis on the writing techniques of the author. For example, Clea Simon, the author of the suspense novel World Enough, commented the novel in her book review delivered in The Boston Globe. She holds the view that writing in the third-person, Ng starts with the familys history, laying the groundwork for Lydias death, and she then moves seamlessly into the weeks beyond, excelling in her sensitive and detailed portraits of grief, the fatigue and disorientation, shock and anger as Lydias survivors reel and slowly regain their footing. Other reports pay attention to the theme of the novel. Lawson (2014) argues that Ng brilliantly depicts the destruction that parents can inflict on their children and on each other. Whats more, Schluep (2014) holds the opinion that Ng explores alienation, achievement, race, gender, family, and identity in the novel.All in all, many critics abroad have mainly revolved around the identity, racial issues, feminism, and family education in the book.2.2 Studies in ChinaCompared with foreign countries, domestic research on Everything I Never Told You is more abundant. In recent years, scholars in China prefer to analyze Everything I Never Told You from the perspective of the initiation theme. For example, in Study on the initiation theme in Everything I Never Told You, Zhang Yongqin (2020) argues that Lydias identity as a hybrid has always put her in the dilemma of achieving psychological maturity. Lydias father, James Lee, and mother, Marilyn Lee, are negative guides in her growing-up, whose expectations had a harmful influence to Lydia. Whats more, Gao Yuanshan (2021) thinks that James faces three different kinds of dilemmas in American society, that is, the identity crisis penetrating into his growth process, marriage life and parent-child relationship, and the loneliness and frustration he had been suffering were passed on to his children with ties of blood. In terms of artistic expression, Wang Lisha (2021) holds the view that this title of the novel has obvious symbolic meaning. In addition, objects such as kitchen, moon, amber, fly and necklace are also symbols to reveal contemporary peoples involuntariness to their own life. On top of that, in Footprints on the Ceiling: On the Construction of Narrative Ethics in Everything I Never Told You, Chen Yanqiong (2020) argues that through multiple perspectives and narrative structures, multi-dimensional characterization and other narrative means, Everything I Never Told You reflects on the living conditions of an American-Chinese mixed-race family from a more complex and diverse level.Of course, apart from the studies above, there are many other analyses from other aspects. Some articles explore the living conditions of Chinese American women from the perspectives of ecological feminism, identity construction and trauma theory. Obviously, Lydias tragedy is a very noteworthy issue in this work.2.3 Need for the StudyLydias suicide is not only a tragedy to her family, but also a reflection on todays serious social American problems --- racial discrimination. With the increase of global immigration, the number of mixed marriages is also increasing rapidly. Even in the multicultural United States, there is racial discrimination, which exists between whites and blacks, and between Europeans and Asians. For many years, interracial marriage has been regarded as contrary to common sense and has not been widely accepted. It was not until 1967 that the Supreme Court of the United States abolished the prohibition of intermarriage, breaking the shackles. But in real life, there are still many white Americans who dont accept this kind of family. Lydias family, as a cross racial marriage family, is facing many questions from the society.Since scholars abroad and at home have already had some researches on this novel, they are very helpful to the analysis of this thesis. However, most of these scholars use trauma theory to analyze several characters in the novel at the same time, so they do not make a detailed and comprehensive analysis of Lydia herself. This paper focuses on Lydia to reveal a series of problems and crises faced by mixed race children in cross racial marriage in American society by excavating her identity recognition and psychological trauma. Although Lydia inherited her mothers blue eyes, she was also discriminated against by her classmates as an outsider. Her father was afraid of socializing, but he was eager for his daughter to have a good interpersonal relationship. In order to meet her fathers requirements, Lydia had to pretend to be close to classmates and call her friends every day. Her mother cant get out of her comfort zone, but she places her dream of being a doctor on her child. The mothers desire to excel over others and excessive expectation and preference led to the psychological problems of Lydia and prompted her to commit suicide. Trauma is the result of social politics, race, colonization, war, domestic violence, poverty and other factors. Researching the long-term impact of these events on individuals highlights the attention to the life and voice of marginalized groups.References:Canfield, David. (2018). Celeste Ng Has Become the Novelist of the Moment. Entertainment Weekly, 23 March.Chae, Youngsuk. (2015). For a critical multiculturalism: politicizing Asian American literature. The Pennsylvania State University.Chang, Chiung-huei Joan. (2018). Transforming Chinese American literature: A Study of History, Sexuality. The Pennsylvania State University.Chee, Alexander. (2014). Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. The New York Times, 17 Aug.Chen, Yanqiong. (2017). A Brief Analysis of Marginalization in Everything I Never Told You. Journal of Literature and Art Studies, 8 July.Connors, Joanna. (2016). Writer Celeste Ng Talks about Growing up in Shaker Heights and Her Buzz Novel of the Summer, Everything I Never Told You. Cleveland. Com 27 May. .Lawson, Mark. G. (2014). An Acute Portrait of Family Psychopathologythis Debut Crime Thriller is a Surprise Choice as Amazons Book of the Year. The Guardian.Ru, Freeman. (2014). Celeste Ng: Whose Debut Novel, Everything I Never Told You will be Published in July by Penguin Press. Poets Writers Magazine, 42, 46-47.Schluep, Chris. (2014). Everything I Never Told You tops Amazons 100 Best Books of 2014. The Guardian.Simon, Clea. (2014). Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. The Boston Globe. 陈燕琼（2020），《无声告白》的生态女性主义解读。

《乐山师范学院学报》，（3）：33-37,79。

高源杉（2021），《无声告白》中詹姆斯的三重困境与他者烙印探讨。

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2. 研究的基本内容、问题解决措施及方案

This paper aims to analyze the death of Lydia from the perspective of trauma theory. The readers can find that Lydias tragedy is not only her personal tragedy, but also the tragedy of a cross racial family, and the tragedy of the whole society. The theory of trauma helps the readers to better understand not only Lydias alienation and disconnection with friends and community owing to the racial discrimination, but also her unbearable and helpless feeling under the excessively high pressure and expectations from parents．This paper intends to use the following research methods. First of all, literature research. After Ive decided what I want to study, I have read many periodical literature, doctoral and masters theses and any literature related to Everything I Never Told You. Then, inductive method. I will summarize the main ideas of the references and the theory of trauma to have a better understanding of the novel. In the end, I will make analysis to find out Lydias contradictions with her family and society, and solve the problems listed before.

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