The book Annie John touches upon many themes, but the primary one that seems to drive the plot is the mother-daughter relationship. This paper will discuss the dynamics of the mother daughter relationship and how this theme sums up the plot of the book. In addition to that, the focus points of this paper will be identity crisis and relationship obstacles that adolescents go through. Those aspects and obstacles are the usual phenomenon of adolescence. We will try to understand Annie’s character and her identity development/crisis through the lens of Erikson and Brown-Gilligan. Annie is undoubtedly facing identity crisis, because we see issues with her personality and her trying to understand who she is. She is trying to figure out who she is …show more content…
We see this many times in the book, because of the way she describes her mother. There is a change in her words and the way she looks at her mother and the way she responds back to her mother. All these changes take place during her adolescence stage, and the reason behind is that identity crisis. Even though the mother helps her to realize that she is becoming a woman now, Annie does not take that positively. Instead, for her that is seen as a pushback, neglect, and loss of love from her mother. This makes things more complicated for her as she is growing up. She starts to search for other relationships. She starts to find that maternal love in other people and the most important of them is Gwen, the Red …show more content…
We see her losing vitality, sense of identity, and the immunity to depression. She has these fantasies that she wish were true. Sometimes she wish she would go back to being a child, and she misses her childhood and spending such intimate time with her mother. There are times when she has dreams and thoughts about losing her mother. She fears separation from her mother. She still cannot take in the fact that her mother won’t be there forever with her. We see this happening for the first time when she is asked to read aloud her story in Miss Nelson’s class. In the story, we can see Annie fears separation from her mother. We can see that she does not want to lose her mother at all. In the story she mentions how she sees her mother going away from her and she is unable to find her. The story symbolizes that fear of separation from her mother. This fear of separation thus is a part of that identity crisis. She was so used to being with her mother all the time, and now it is impossible for her to imagine that one day she will not be there. Annie