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From Maslow’s Need Theory
李林圆
西安外国语大学英文学院 陕西 西安 710128
Abstract：Alice Munro’s short story An Ounce of Care describes a teenage girl’s growing pains. This paper will discuss this unnamed narrator’s specific growing pains in light of Maslow’s need theory. From this girl’s life experience, the growing pains are unavoidable, but one still can overcome these pains and grow up.
Key Words: An Ounce of Care; growing pains; Maslow’s need theory;
Alice Munro, who is well known for her short stories and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2013. According to what Holcombe Garan said in 2005, Munro’s fiction deals with “love and work, and the failings ofboth”.An Ounce of Care mainly talks about a teenage girl who has been dumped by Martin and then she experienced a lot of growing pains. This paper attempts to analyze the narrator’s growing pains in perspective of safety needs, belongingness and love and esteem needs from Maslow’s need theory.
According to Maslow’s need theory, humans will experience the five layers of needs, so does this girl. When safety needs, belongingness and love needs and esteemneeds don’t met her, her growing pains accordingly appear.
Sense of safety is the first thing that the girl needs.In this story, she has to babysit for some parents on Saturday nights. Under the age of sixteen, the girl needs to do the part-time job at resting nights, which can show their family has financial pressure. Obviously, she is a young teenage girl and it’s not safe to go out at nights without any company. Second, it is the Saturday night when people often rest and relax. But this girl still chooses to be a babysitter. Even she gets caught as being drunk and is driven home by Mr. Berrymans, her still remembers that “he did not mention paying me for my baba-sitting services of the evening and the subject did not occur to me either” ( Munro:119). It is because she has a strong feeling of lacking of money, she feels unsafe with financial support from her family. So this girl is lacking of the sense of safety.
Besides, she lacks of belongingness and love which involves emotionally-based relationships such as friendship, intimacy, belonging to a group. First, her intimacy with a boy named Martin Collingwood fails. She falls in love with Martin but is dropped by him. She feels pain, despair maybe as well as hatred.. She longs to keep this intimate relationship with Martin and the break-up breaks her heart, intimacy with this boy fails quickly. What’s worse, her parents ignore her feelings. Being dropped by Martin, she should have been soothed by her parents, but her mother made her more despair and she can’t feel being loved. In addition, she has no feeling of belongingness in campus. At Spring Dance, she’s not invited as a dance partner except the only boy Millerd Crompton who asks so many girls. And her only friend Joyce is very popular and has lots of other friends. When she is drunk and found by the host, Joyce and the other people leave the girl alone to face this embarrassing situation. As a result, she has no feeling of belongingness to this group. In fact, belongingness and love are her needs.
Finally, the girl’s self-esteem is strongly ruined by Martin Collingwood, Mr. Berrymans and her mother. She cherishes her first love very much but Martin drops her. When she needs comfort, her mother’ words hurt her again. And Mr. Berrymans’s words increase this girl’s pressure and damage her self-esteem. When found drunk , she was driven home by Mr. Berrymans who forced her to tell tell her mother what happens. What’s worse, her mother tells girl’s matter to others and almost everyone in town knows what happened. Since then, no one calls her anymore and she gets the sinful reputation in the high school. The girl’s pride is deeply ruined. At the end of this short story, the girl gets completely over Martin Collingwood and becomes a mature woman. She really grows up. In a way, she is up to self- actualization needs.
In a word, the girl lacks of safety, belongingness and love and esteem needs from Maslow’s need theory when she’s growing up. After these sufferings and depression, this teenage girl becomes a mature and decent girl at last. Her experience called by her as the catastrophe is not a catastrophe any longer, which helps her to grow up and understand the meaning of nature of growing pains.
WORKS CITED
[1]Holcombe,Garan. Alice MunroContemporary Writers. London: British Arts Council,2005. Print.
[2]Munro,Alice.“An Ounce of Care”.The British and American Fiction. Ed. Nan Jianchong. 112-120. Print.
作者简介：李林圆，1991年6月9日出生，女，汉族，现就读于西安外国语大学英文学院2015级英语语言文学专业。主要研究方向：英国文学。
论文作者:李林圆
论文发表刊物:《语言文字学》2018年第1期
论文发表时间:2018/3/30
标签：西安论文; 英文论文; 汉族论文; 外国语大学论文; 期刊论文; 学院论文; 英国论文; 《语言文字学》2018年第1期论文;