Proceedings of the Critical Island Studies 2023 Conference (CISC 2023)

“Is Happiness a Dream?”: A Psychological Reading on Jacqueline Wilson’s The Suitcase Kid

Authors
Muh. Arif Rokhman1, *
1Department of Inter-Cultural Studies, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogakarta, Indonesia
*Corresponding author. Email: arokhman@ugm.ac.id
Corresponding Author
Muh. Arif Rokhman
Available Online 11 January 2024.
DOI
10.2991/978-2-38476-186-9_12How to use a DOI?
Keywords
Suitcase kid; Family problem; Modern English family; Anxiety; Defence mechanism
ABSTRACT

The research aimed at identifying the anxieties and defence mechanisms in the main character of a novel, The Suitcase Kid as it employed those psychological theories. The method of analysis is focussed on the analysis of the main character, Andrea who was a 10-year-old girl and whose parents are divorced. As the only child in the family, the divorce brings a very deep impact on her as her parents then get married. Her father married a woman, and her mother also married a man. As Andy has two new different families, she had to move from one to the other every week and experienced anxieties due to the divorce and attempted to overcome them by performing self defence mechanism. Having the fear of abandonment, fear of betrayal, and unstable sense of self, she developed defence mechanism including denial, projection, displacement, regression, fixation, and avoidance. The result showed that the main character suffers from the disorder and attempts to overcome them. The message of the novel is that divorce will bring psychological negative impacts on the children. Yet, the teenager also attempts to handle her problems.

Copyright
© 2023 The Author(s)
Open Access
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

Volume Title
Proceedings of the Critical Island Studies 2023 Conference (CISC 2023)
Series
Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research
Publication Date
11 January 2024
ISBN
978-2-38476-186-9
ISSN
2352-5398
DOI
10.2991/978-2-38476-186-9_12How to use a DOI?
Copyright
© 2023 The Author(s)
Open Access
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Cite this article

TY  - CONF
AU  - Muh. Arif Rokhman
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/01/11
TI  - “Is Happiness a Dream?”: A Psychological Reading on Jacqueline Wilson’s The Suitcase Kid
BT  - Proceedings of the Critical Island Studies 2023 Conference (CISC 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 118
EP  - 123
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-186-9_12
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-186-9_12
ID  - Rokhman2024
ER  -