The Stayer, Escaper And Rebel Of Chinatown: A Horneyan Interpretation Of The Neurotic Personalities Of The Three Daughters In Bone

Bone, which tells a story of a Chinese American family in Chinatown and depicts the difficult life of the three daughters in the family, is the debut of the contemporary Chinese American writer Fae Myenne Ng. In the novel, Fae Myenne Ng describes a disordered family in which one daughter in the family uses drugs, the second escapes from home, and the third commits suicide. It is apparently that the family is an abnormal one, and the three daughters all suffer from different degrees of mental illness in one way or another.According to American psychoanalyst Karen Horney, the psychological disease is deeply connected to the family condition and the social-cultural environment. And she emphasizes that a person’s neurotic personality is caused by the basic anxiety arising from childhood insecurities and a lack of parental affection as well as adverse cultural environmental reasons. By the method of textual analysis under the guide of Horney’s theory, the author of this thesis finds out that Leila, Nina and Ona each belongs to a neurotic type, namely, compliance, withdrawal and aggression.Because of the lack of parental affection, the complaint type Leila develops the intrapsychic strategy of self-hate and self-contempt, and forms the interpersonal strategy of self-sacrifice and neurotic chasing for love. Because of the depressed living condition, the withdrawal type Nina generates the intrapsychic strategy of self-pride and the interpersonal strategy of escaping from others. The aggressive type Ona forms the intrapsychic strategy of repressed hostility and the interpersonal strategy of rebelling because of father’s wrong way of education.By analyzing the causes of basic anxiety and the intrapsychic and interpersonal defensive strategies of the three daughters, this paper reveals the reasons beneath the three daughters’ weird behaviors, and the deep reasons of their tragic fate. And it further discusses the inner conflict of the second generation of Chinese Americans. Besides, in the novel Fae Myenne Ng points that the American social-cultural environment has great impacts on the Chinese Americans’ life. Therefore, the novel also enlightens us to build a good family and social-cultural environment to help children grow healthily and form a sound personality.