On The Love Wife From The Perspective Of Memory Theory

Gish Jen is one of the representative writers of contemporary Chinese American literature,who is as famous as Maine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan.She has won several awards including the Massachusetts Book Award and the National Endowment for the Arts.Gish Jen’s The Love Wife,published in 2004,has attracted widespread attention from scholars at home and abroad for its profound thoughts on interracial adoption and marriage in American mixed family.Guided by Karen Horney’s psychoanalysis and memory theory,this thesis analyzes the identity anxiety of four members in the interracial family in The Love Wife,revealing the causes of identity anxiety among whites and ethnic minorities in both family from individual memory and social memory.In The Love Wife,Jen explores how different ethnic groups and generations dynamically reconstruct selfidentity through cultural memory so as to realize the wish of family love return and racial integration.There are five chapters in this thesis.Chapter One briefly introduces Gish Jen and The Love Wife,sorts out the literature review of Gish Jen’s works and this novel,summarizes the theoretical framework and presents the thesis statement.Chapter Two comprehensively analyzes the neurotic tendencies and anxiety representations of Blondie,Carnegie,and the adopted girls Lizzy and Wendy,guided by Karen Horney’s psychoanalytic anxiety theory.Chapter Three takes memory as the entry point,which agrees with Horney’s point of view that social and cultural environments affect individual psychology.The causes of characters’ anxiety from the aspects of individual memory and social memory are then thoroughly analyzed.First,the remembrance of the dead and the rapture of memory as forms of individual memory have caused the variations of the Wongs’ identities,which leads to their identity anxieties.Secondly,white supremacy and racial discrimination as social memories render the Wongs "the Other".Blondie’s internalized memory of white supremacy collapses with Lan’s arrival,while Carnegie and the adopted girls fall into self-doubt due to the assimilation of racial discrimination,which aggravates their identity anxieties.Chapter Four discusses the role of cultural memory in dispelling anxiety and reconstructing self-identity,and analyzes how the characters in the novel reshape themselves with the help of storage memory and functional memory.Memory is an important part of forming identity cognition.When faced with identity anxiety,the different ways that characters treat memory may have different effects on identity construction.Chapter Five is the conclusion,revealing that the Wang family with mixed ethnic and non-consanguinity is the overall concern of American society.It points out the practical significance of this thesis,that is the survival and development of Chinese American and other marginalized social groups.In summary,this thesis combines Karen Horney’s psychoanalysis and memory theory to interpret the identity anxiety and self-identity reconstruction of interracial family members in The Love Wife.By so doing,it aims to reconsider the issue of ethnicity and bloodline determining identity,showing Gish Jen’s beautiful hope for the integration of different ethnic groups through love in American society.