Personality Harmoniousness Interpretation Of The House On Mango Street In The View Of Freud's Personality Theory

The House on Mango Street is the first masterpiece of the famous contemporary Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros.The novel has drawn much attention since its publication in 1984.It is a novel full of positive energy.Words and sentences of the novel are quite simple,but meaning is profound.It has won several awards and has been translated into over a dozen languages and even been taught in schools and universities across the United States.Since its publication,both foreign and domestic scholars have studied on the novel from various perspectives,such as marginalized identity,feminism,postmodernism and ecologism.In the present thesis,on the basis of Freud's personality theory,three essential factors of harmonious personality are correspondingly generalized according to personality structure,personality adaption and personality motivation.Namely,completed personality structure,successful personality adaption and balanced distribution of psychic energy.And then from that perspective,personality harmoniousness of several characters in the novel is interpreted by the approach of comparison.Through the interpretation,it is found that if one wants to get away from Mango Street successfully,he or she should own the harmonious personality discussed above.This study provides readers a new perspective to understand The House on Mango Street and lights a lamp for children who live on “Mango Street” which represents poverty,mass,discrimination and restriction.The thesis is composed of five chapters.The first chapter is introduction,it provides background information of the novel The House on Mango Street,a review of researches conducted by both foreign and domestic scholars about the novel,and the significance,innovative points of the thesis.Chapter Two is the theoretical basis of the present thesis.In this chapter,personality structure,personality adaption and personality motivation are stated,on the basis of which,harmonious personality is discussed and three essential factors are generalized.Chapter Three and Chapter Four are the main body of the present thesis.The former interprets the heroine Esperanza who got away from Mango Street successfully.Although there are plenty of conflicts among the id,the ego and superego,Esperanza finally managed to form a harmonious personality through observing herself and the external world around her.With a better understanding about herself and the external world,she treated the id,the ego and superego equally.Then by appropriately applying defense mechanisms,she finally formed a harmonious personality which not only complete and normal,but also balanced and coordinated.The latter interprets three types of children who failed to get away from Mango Street.The three types of children are respectively featured by incomplete personality structure,complete but abnormalpersonality and normal but unbalanced personality.The last chapter is conclusion.It summarizes the whole thesis,the realistic significance and the hope of the author of the present thesis are proposed as well.