Distorted Personality And Self-Salvation

To Kill a Mockingbird is the representative work of Harper Lee,a world-famous American writer.Moreover,it is her only novel.Once it was firstly published,it gained high popularity and got very great sensation.And this novel won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize,which laid an unshakable position in American literature.This story is mainly about a white lawyer who defended a black Tom who was accused of raping a white girl,but he failed at last.The theme of racial discrimination is involved apparently.In addition,this novel was published in the right time when black rights were firstly written into the institution,so there has been a boom in reading To Kill a Mockingbird.The plot is compact,and the writer's fluent writing delicately sketches out vivid images for us,while this paper selects one of the female images,Mayella Ewell,to analyze.This story called To kill a Mockingbird took place in the 1960 s.Racial discrimination was still deeply rooted in people's minds.Mayella Ewell's reaction to social pressure at the bottom of the white class was the best proof of the collective unconscious.The collective unconscious theory is originally proposed by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.Compared with Freud's individual unconscious theory,Jung's collective unconscious rooted not only in biology but also in the influence of social factors on personality,expands the unconscious from the individual to the collective,pushes the collective unconscious to the spiritual heritage of the ancient races,and reveals the innate instincts and behavior patterns of human beings.Based on Jung's the collective unconscious,this study aims at exploring Mayella Ewell 's image in To Kill a Mockingbird from the perspectives of the four archetypes,the persona,the shadow,the Animus and the self.So we can discover the reason why she slanders Tom raping her and can be conscious of loneliness and inferiority in terms of the character.Moreover,this paper appeals to mankind to overcome their collective unconscious and to jointly construct an equal and just society.The first section of this paper is an introduction to the author Harper Lee and the novel To Kill a Mockingbird,as well as a brief summary of the research on the writer and the novel by writers and critics both at home and abroad.It explains that the purpose of this paper is to use the collective unconscious to study four archetypes in To Kill a Mockingbird.The second section is mainly about the collective unconscious including its context,historical development and significance.It focuses on four archetypes,namely,the persona,the shadow,the Animus and the self.The third section is the most important part of the thesis,mainly employing the four archetypes of the collective unconscious to analyze the text content so that the causes of the characters' behavior and the complex character of Mayella can be interpreted.In the third chapter,the author uses the archetype the persona to analyze the reason why Mayella slandered Tom for raping her and her loneliness in life.Then the archetype shadow is used to analyze Mayella's physical and mental repression,such as frequent beatings by his father,housework and psychological repression.When this repression accumulates and is too severe,the persona disintegrates and the shadows explode in disastrous forms in court.As a result,Mayella is a woman of distorted personality.Chapter Four analyzes the male side of Mayella from the perspective of Animus and through the archetype the self draws the conclusion that Mayella cannot give up the persona,let alone recognize the shadow,and she cannot admit that Animus is a part of her life,so the self cannot be realized and self-salvation can't be finished,and eventually leads to her tragedy of personality.The last part is a logical summary of the whole paper.A conclusion can be drawn that the reason why Mayella Ewell slandered Tom is that she was influenced by the collective unconscious and all her performances in the court prove that she has a sense of inferiority and helplessness.