| Summary: | 碩士 === 臺北市立大學 === 英語教學系 === 103 === Abstract
This thesis aims to explore how the orphan girls in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden establish their self-identity in terms of Lawrence Buell’s idea of place and Carl F. Graumann’s process of identification.
The discussion mainly focuses on how the orphan girls turn from being the outsiders to being significant members of the family and the community. Drawing on Buell’s theory, the place contains both the social and the natural part. The social focuses on how the orphan girls adapt themselves to their living places by learning the social norms, values, and manners of the community. As for the natural aspect, this study centers on how the orphan girls establish their relationship with their living environment and how they recognize and integrate themselves in the surroundings. Both the social and natural aspects are important in the orphan girls’ searching for self-identity. Buell suggests that people attach themselves to places through five models: concentric areas of affiliation, archipelago of locales, mobility and migration, imaginative landmarks, and virtual or fictive places. Since the orphan girls are in a sense restricted in their mobility and place-exploration, this thesis will focus on the first model, concentric areas of affiliation, to inspect how they establish their identity by expanding their place attachment from homes, to neighborhoods, and to the communities. The process of the orphan girls’ searching for new identity from the social and natural aspects is based on Graumann’s steps of identification: identifying the environment, being identified, and identifying with one’s environment.
The goal of this thesis is to discover the relationship between place and orphan girls’ pursuit of self-identity. Besides, the study also finds the difference of Lucy Maud Montgomery and Frances Hodgson Burnett in portraying the influence of the cultural and the natural on these two orphan girls. Montgomery focuses more on the influences of social values and social construction to the orphan girl’s identity while Burnett focuses more on the natural environment to the orphan girl. Though both of the books were published in the early twentieth century, each of these two authors has her own emphasis which results from the different writing backgrounds.
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