Interpretation Of Mona’s Pursuit For Self In Mona In The Promised Land From The “Mirror Stage” Theory

Gish Jen, born Lillian Jen, is a celebrated contemporary Chinese American writer. Her second novel, Mona in the Promised Land(1996), is a coming-of-age story set in a Jewish suburbia, featuring a female protagonist for whom the pursuit for cultural and ethnic identity is compounded by her origin as daughter of Chinese immigrants. Studies from different angles and themes on the novel have been worked on from both domestic and overseas academia. However, most of these studies more commonly explore the third space of the identification and the mother-daughter relationship between the first and the second Chinese American immigrants, applying either the hybridity theory of the post-colonialism or the diaspora criticism of the post-modernism. Few of the academic papers have analyzed the novel from the psychoanalytic point of view, which provides the feasibility and necessity of the study of this paper whose entry point is the image identification based on the Mirror Stage theory.This paper attempts to analyze the resemblance between the protagonist, Mona?s identity bewilderment, pursuit and construction under the multiculturalism and the infant?s experiencing the pre-mirror, mirror and post-mirror stages of development in Lacan?s Mirror Stage theory. The main body firstly probes into Mona?s at the pre-mirror stage. As a Chinese immigrant newcomer in rich Jewish community in America, Mona takes her Mother?s desire as her own desire. She experiences and enjoys her Chinese identity with maintenance and inheritance to her Chineseness. Then, the paper analyzes Mona?s awakening of self-consciousness and her formation of ego under the influence of the other through imaginary identification(converting to Judaism and seeking for individualism and racial equality in Chinese family) and also inquires into the mutual exclusion that has thus stirred up, which gives rise to the alienation of mother-daughter relationship. At last, the paper illuminates Mona’s gaining the “fixed” image though symbolic introjection under the influence of the Other. Mona has identified with the Chinese American Jewish identity, which meets the need of the adaptation to the globalization and the multiculturalism and bestows the belongingness on Mona. In conclusion, the paper intends to point out that under the cultural collision and fusion, ethnic groups, when faced with identification, may be caught in bewilderment or misrecognition as the infant goes through the pre-mirror and mirror stages. Nonetheless, when they enter the post-mirror stage, under the influence of social language and customs, they symbolically introject themselves onto the image that can both meet the need of accommodating the multiculturalism and render the belongingness, and then they acquire the “fix” image, namely a definite identity. However, the role that the others play in the pursuit of identity and the constitution of the self can never be underestimated.