A child who is abused by her parent wonders about the reason behind the abuse. Thinking about the reasoning behind the abuse leads the child to believe that she deserves to be punished. The belief that she deserves to be punished leads to lower self-esteem. Low self-esteem causes the individual to seek more power. The search for more power leads her to abuse her own children to feel better about herself. Feeling better about herself by abusing another leads the girl to realize that she is the same as her abusive parent. The realization that she is turning into an abusive parent like her own makes the individual change her behaviour because she does not want her child to experience abuse like she did. The psychoanalytical literary lens helps interpret the actions of a character by focusing on human behaviours and the thought processes that lie behind them. The idea is that psychoanalyzing characters in a novel can aid in analyzing the author. A simpler extension of this notion is that analyzing the characters in a novel helps readers learn something about their own lives. This lens focuses on the reasoning …show more content…
Abuse hurts a child both physically and mentally. Pain from the abuse makes the child explore the cause behind the parent’s action. The child explores the cause behind the parent’s action because of human nature. It is human nature to try and prevent damaging experiences from repeating. That is why the child wants to know why she was abused to prevent it from reoccurring in the future. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, a novel by Anne Tyler, Jennifer Tull, the daughter of an abusive mother, Pearl Tull, tries to analyze her actions with her brothers Cody and Ezra to figure out why their mother “went on one of her rampages”(49). Cody repeatedly asks his sister, Jenny, what she did wrong to unleash their mother’s wrath to which she responds with a solemn, “ ‘Nothing. I promise.’