Identity Crisis as Literary Theme

Significance

Literary criticism concerns itself not so much with the reconstruction of plot as with the study of themes, characters, and the use of techniques. From Greek playwright SophoclesOidipous Tryanos (c. 429 b.c.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1729) to African American writer Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), the identity crisis has demonstrated its power as one of the main thematic concerns in literature. Tragedy becomes ineluctable when characters are unable to extricate themselves from the conflict between who they are and who they are supposed to be. Conversely, characters’ awareness of their true selves is essential to the eventual achievement of self-actualization. In American literature, especially contemporary American literature, an identity crisis is frequently occasioned by conflict. Conflict between a person or group and another person, group, or natural force is what drives one into change.

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Society and the Identity Crisis

Literature is often born in protest, in rebellion. The previous generation, the other continent, the other race seeks to impose upon the new generation an outdated set of rules; the new culture, to exist, must overturn the old culture that can no longer serve. Being fully aware of the dialectical relationship between individual and society, many contemporary American writers are antithetical to society’s propensity for materialism and commercialization and are suspicious of tradition’s valetudinarian impact. In their works, characters’ sense of self and their acceptable role in society constitutes a major conflict, which possesses the potential for tragedy.

J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) concerns the narrator Holden Caulfield’s struggle to identify his relationship with society. Holden, a teenager, is well read and perceptive. He has been kicked out of four private prep schools, partly because he does not want to “play the game according to the rules.” It is true that Holden’s self-righteousness blinds him to his own weaknesses and limitations. His negative feelings about society eliminate any possibility of compromise. Social pressure that is directed toward molding him into who he does not want to be equally contributes to the emotional stress he has to endure. An identity crisis takes its toll; Holden suffers a nervous breakdown and is sent to a mental hospital.

In Walker’s The Color Purple, a group of characters suffer confusion about their true identity and their designated roles in society. Their confusion precipitates the creation of not only personal but also social tragedy. Harpo and Sofia are a happy couple. Harpo is not as physically and emotionally strong as Sofia. Given a choice, he would be happy to be who he is, but Harpo’s father tells him to be the man of the house and take control. Harpo and Sofia’s resultant conflict eventually leads to the separation of the two. The reader learns that Harpo’s father, Albert, had a similar experience. Listening to his father turned Albert into a victim of moribund traditions.

Culture and the Identity Crisis

To celebrate the diversity of American society is to recognize literary voices whose power is generated by writers’ deep identification with their race and gender. Such voices call readers’ attention to the uniqueness of experience. In an attempt to democratize American literary voices, many contemporary American writers of color want to reclaim their sense of history and identity by exploring what has been lost in scholars’ subjective reconstruction of history. Their works portray characters’ struggle in search of their ontological as well as cultural identity.

Japanese American writer John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957) describes a person’s struggle to balance two cultures. Ichiro Yamada is a Nisei, a second-generation Japanese American. His confusion about his identity is revealed in his imaginary conversation with his mother in which he laments that there was a time in which he believed he was the peach boy, born to an old woman and a Japanese warrior. There was also a time in which he was only half Japanese because “one is not born in America and raised in America and taught in America and one does not speak and swear and drink and smoke and play and fight and see and hear in America among Americans in American streets and houses without becoming American and loving it.” Ichiro refuses to join the military during World War II, partly because of his loyalty to his parents and partly because of his resentment of the mistreatment Japanese Americans have experienced. After he is released from prison, his search for his identity leads him to the conclusion that he is just as Japanese as he is American.

In Chinese American writer Amy Tan’s critically acclaimed The Joy Luck Club (1989), the author portrays a group of second-generation Chinese Americans’ search for their ontological connection with their ethnic cultural heritage. After Suyuan Woo passes away, Jing-mei Woo is asked by members of the Joy Luck Club to replace her mother at the mah-jongg table. At first, she is reluctant. Although she half-heartedly accepts her Chinese name and tells her “aunties” that it is “becoming fashionable for American-born Chinese to use their Chinese names,” she is not aware of the fact that it is impossible for her to find her identity without reclaiming her relationship with her ethnic cultural heritage. After joining the Joy Luck Club, Jing-mei starts to understand her mother. She finally realizes that “Once you are born Chinese, you cannot help but feel and think Chinese.” Her trip to China enables her to see that together with her sisters, they look just like their mother, her “same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish.” The Joy Luck Club also deals with issues related to gender identity. Ying-ying St. Clair has been struggling with her identity throughout her life. As a little girl in China, she is told by people around her that a “girl can never ask, only listen,” a “boy can run and chase dragonflies, because that is his nature,” but “a girl should stand still.” She is also told that woman is “yin, the darkness within where untempered passions” lie and man is “yang, bright truth lighting our minds.” After she and Clifford St. Clair are married, Clifford starts to tell people that he has “saved her from a terrible life” in China. He also replaces her Chinese name (Gu Ying-ying) with an American name, Betty St. Clair, and puts down the wrong birth year when they first come to the United States. The “sweep” of Clifford’s pen not only changes Ying-ying’s name and birth year, it also threatens to obliterate her identity by cutting her off from her culture and her past. Ying-ying’s insistence on using her Chinese first name, therefore, takes on a thematic significance.

Lisa Ko's debut novel The Leavers (2017) focuses on a character struggling to reconcile his identity in the face of a prodigious change in his cultural lifestyle and expectations. Born in the United States, Deming finds himself searching for a new way to be after his mother, a Chinese immigrant, disappears when he is a child and he is forced to leave behind the life he knew and adapt to a new one. Adopted by a white, academic couple, he is given a new name and must learn to be himself, finding definition through music even as he struggles with memories of his mother and his past as well as the expectations of his adoptive parents.

Tragedy and Identity Crisis

Conflict has always been an important subject in literature. It has a direct bearing on writers’ thematic concerns. In much American literature, tragedy is closely tied to characters’ confusion about their identity. Their emotional sufferings are frequently occasioned by their inability to overcome the crisis. T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” uses the dramatic monologue form to depict a person’s wavering between wanting to be himself and the familiar comforts of an emotionally closed, drawing-room life. Prufrock is a middle-aged man who feels attracted and repulsed by a room symbolic of highbrow society. He oscillates between a reality filled with “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells” and a room in which “women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.” The narrator’s problem is not that he does not know who he is, but that he lacks the courage to be who he is. The conflict between his true and false identities vividly portrays a modern tragedy: not one in which the hero dies but one in which the hero lives an unheroic life. The poem ends with the narrator’s capitulation: “Till human voices wake us, and we drown.” Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) is another modern tragedy. The main character Willy Loman has been unable to resolve his identity crisis throughout his life. Willy’s sometimes contradictory behavior underlines the intensity of the war within himself. It reveals the conflict between Willy the innocent and Willy the imposter. Publicly, Willy teaches his sons received and accepted values. When he is by himself, Willy wonders if he is teaching his children the right kind of values. The Willy in public is all business. He warns his children about the importance of appearance and speech: “And don’t say ‘Gee’. ‘Gee’ is a boy’s word. A man walking in for fifteen thousand dollars does not say ‘Gee’!” Willy in private displays his aesthetic sense: “Gee, look at the moon moving between the buildings.” Willy the salesman makes a living, or fails to, with his appearance and mouth. The true Willy enjoys working with his hands. After Willy takes his own life, his son Biff suggests that Willy’s problem is not only that “he had the wrong dreams,” but also that “he never knew who he was.”

Together with love and death, the identity crisis has consistently demonstrated its thematic power in literature. Its portrayal challenges readers to think about their own relationship with society, to elevate their self-awareness to a higher level, and to pursue and achieve self-realization.

Bibliography

Barrow, Craig. Gender, Race, and Identity. Southern Humanities Press, 1993. Ties together the study of gender and race identity.

Dixon, Melvin. Ride out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature. U of Illinois P, 1987. A unique study of the connection between culture and individual identity.

Frosh, Stephen. Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and the Self. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1991. A perceptive analysis of the dialectical connections among the individual, culture, and society.

Jen, Gish. "Migration, a Makeshift Family, and Then a Disappearance." Review of The Leavers, by Lisa Ko. The New York Times, 16 May 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/books/review/the-leavers-by-lisa-ko.html. Accessed 26 Aug. 2019.

Massey, Irving. Identity and Community: Reflections on English, Yiddish, and French Literature in Canada. Wayne State UP, 1994. A comprehensive study of identity-related issues in Canadian literature.

Schier, Helga. Going Beyond: The Crisis of Identity and Identity Models in Contemporary American, English, and German Fiction. Niemeyer, 1993. One of few works that focuses on the study of identity crisis and provides a global perspective on the issue.

Singh, Amritjit, et al. Memory, Narrative, and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures. Northeastern UP, 1994. A collection of essays that examine identity issues in African American, Asian American, Hispanic, and American Indian literature and cultures. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Wright, Lee Alfred. Identity, Family, and Folklore in African American Literature. Garland, 1995. Takes a historical look at how African American writers use folklore and literature to deal with identity crisis.

Zeineddine, Nada. Because It Is My Name: Problems of Identity Experienced by Women, Artists, and Breadwinners in the Plays of Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. Merlin Books, 1991. A study of identity crisis in drama, especially in contemporary American theater.