A Study Of Love And Vertigo From The Perspective Of "The Uncanny"

Love and Vertigo(2000),written by Hsu-Ming Teo who is a well-known Chinese-Australian female writer in the new century,is her first novel that draws wide attention as soon as it was published under the international tide of immigration.In this novel,she compresses the real immigrated lives into one family and focuses on the description of their psychical dilemma before and after immigration and their struggle process of pursuing their own independent personality and identity when they face all sorts of social injustice and assimilation of host country.“The Uncanny”,published by Sigmund Freud in 1919 for the researches of the psychoanalysis,goes through the endless process of the creation,rise,development,and popularity in numerous fields as one of the famous and heated theories to analyze and resolve the problems of the existence crisis of the modern people.Therefore,it can be properly applied to explore the living anxiety and uncanny feelings of the protagonists in the novel.Based on this theory,this thesis will analyze the novel from several academic concepts—“castration complex”,“the omnipotent of thoughts”,the “uncanny feeling”,“the recurrence of the repression”,the “double”,etc.— in three chapters.Chapter one will discuss the sources of the uncanny about the protagonists before and after immigration,which are the primary reasons that lead to their loss in the foreign culture;Chapter two will analyze the reasons of the constantly recurrence and deepening of their uncanny feelings;Chapter three will explore the process and methods of solving their feelings of uncanniness,which is the pursuit of a “spiritual home” and the construction of their own cultural identity.By analyzing this novel,the thesis will get a conclusion.Due to the great conflicts of immigrants' original culture and foreign culture,for the protagonists in the novel who are members or the offsprings of the diasporas,only by understanding and dealing with this kind of living anxiety and uncanniness from the psychological level can they really solve the diasporic existence crisis.