A Horneyan View Of The Neurotic Personality In Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant

Anne Tyler is an ingenious contemporary American writer who is skillful at portraying human nature and psyche from the stories of common people in their daily family life. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, one of her masterpieces, also concerns the conflicts and struggles within family. Nevertheless, in Tyler’s mind, it is this novel that truly reflects the nature of family. Set in Baltimore, it tells the stories of three generations in the Tull family from 1930 s to 1980 s. Owning to the disturbance in the relationship with others as well as themselves, children in the Tull family suffer bitterly from their anxiety and conflicts. Haunted by a sense of hostility and helplessness, they could not understand each other or make reconciliation with themselves.Focused on the interpersonal and intraphysic conflicts, the thesis analyzes three kinds of neurotic personalities of the children in the Tull family from a Horneyan perspective, trying to describe the process of their self-alienation and their strenuous efforts at self-realization. Each child suffers from fierce conflicts and struggles according to the different neurotic needs, such as the conflicts between moving towards people and moving against them; between moving towards people and away from them; but they are all stuck in the conflicts between escaping from homeand longing for home. In order to achieve a superficial balance and make them less anxious, they would like to give up their real self and make one of those moves consistently predominant, thus develop their neurotic personalities. The thesis analyzes the characteristics of each neurotic personality, the conflicting tendencies that bring them into being, and also their strenuous efforts for a harmonious self and a better life. Finally, they achieve their personality change from self-alienation to self-realization,and understand that the closer to home, the fresher.The dilemma in the Tull family is the typical case of modern men in the modern life. In the 20 th century, especially after the World War II, the whole society is filled with competitiveness, potential hostilities, fears,and anxieties. In order to fight against such anxiety and insecurity, people develop intensified needs for success, wealth or love as if they were solutions of all problems. Even if those needs become neurotic, they are unaware of them. As a southern author with a strong sense of history and nostalgia, Tyler feels the drastic changes in American families, and the tremendous insecurity and anxiety hung on people’s minds. She hopes people could get rid of the terrible situation of self-alienation and selfhatred, and calls for love and forgiveness to help them reconcile with their imperfect home and the imperfect world. Therefore, the study on the characters’ neurotic personality and the family relationship provides us with an opportunity to understand their inner conflicts and homesickness,and to confront their life situations, thus to enrich our self-analysis and the knowledge of human nature.