Unconscious Retrieve Of Family

Joyce Carol Oates (1938—) is a renowned prolific female writer in the contemporary American literary circle. She is good at portraying complicated contemporary American society and living predicaments of modern man by combining modernism and postmodernist approaches. Wonderland remains one of her masterpieces in her earlier works, in which she reflects the social vicissitudes from the economic crisis in the 1930s to the 1960s-1970s, the decades when Americans were prosperous and wealthy but spiritually empty. This paper, taking Traumatic Experience as the departure and Family Complex as theoretical framework, aims at uncovering the way in which Oates exposes modern man's existence dilemma with artistic representations.The thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter One is an introduction. It contains a review of Oates's fictional writings as well as a review of literature about Oates's novel Wonderland. Based on the analysis of her motives of creation, this paper proposes the Freudian concept Traumatic Experience as departure of analysis to re-examine this novel. Through the study of Family Complex in the protagonist's mind, this paper attempts to reveal the universal significance of this novel.Chapter Two concentrates on the concept"Family Complex". This chapter is divided into three parts. Part One mainly provides a detailed illustration of the psychological term, Traumatic Experience, and its psychologic process and result. Part Two analyzes the economic reason and the harmful result of the catastrophe in Jesse's family, which forms a Trauma in the heart of the main character Jesse. Part Three points out that Jesse has an unconscious fixation upon his Trauma, which affects his later life. Based on this consideration of Jesse's life experience, the course of family-losing, family-desiring and family-preserving, this paper raises the definition of Family Complex to include Jesse's behavior around"family", so as to study the characterization of Jesse in Wonderland.