Hannah

The Effect of Bad Parents, Emotional Deprivation and Shame on Adolescent Characters in the Works of Alan Duff

Hannah J. Manning

A thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts in English At the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand Date: 10th December 2010

Hannah Manning Abstract

I

The detrimental consequence that an inadequate, unloving and abusive childhood can have on the psychological development and psychic stability of a child or teenager is a prevalent theme in Duff’s writing. All of Duff’s characters deal with issues of lovelessness and unworthiness born from inadequate parenting. The majority of Duff’s troubled characters have two parents who are, more often than not, unemployed drunks who have always neglected their children in favour of feeding their own addictions. Some of Duff’s youths are lucky enough to have one good parent; however, in these cases, it is still apparent that one inadequate parent is sufficient to cause significant damage to a child. In his novels, Duff’s focus is on the type of adolescent into which these unloved children grow. He depicts the turmoil they experience on a daily basis; he portrays their eternal search for parental replacements and love as well as the lengths to which they go in order to ease the hurt and shame with which they struggle as a result of being unloved and unwanted in childhood. It is surprising, therefore, that critics have typically overlooked this facet of Duff’s work in favour of concentrating on more general criticism of his controversial attitude towards Maori culture and/or violence. This thesis aims to rectify this imbalance by discussing a variety of Duff’s youthful, highly troubled protagonists in terms of their abnormal emotional state and development. To address Duff’s overriding preoccupation with the catastrophic effect of a loveless childhood, I have relied on psychoanalytic insights into abnormal childhood development. By using a psychoanalytic theoretical framework, I

Cited: Primary sources Duff, Alan. Once Were Warriors. Auckland: Random House, 1990. ---. One Night Out Stealing. Auckland: Tandem Press, 1991. ---. State Ward. Auckland: Random House, 1994. ---. Both Sides of the Moon. Auckland: Random House, 1998. ---. Maori: the Crisis and the Challenge. Auckland: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1993. ---. Dreamboat Dad. Auckland: Random House, 2008. ---. Who Sings for Lu? Auckland: Random House, 2009. Secondary sources Bilbrough, Norman. “Duff’s Angry Rave.” Dominion (Jan 1999): 20. Bollas, Christopher. “The Aesthetic Moment and the Search for Transformation.” Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces: Literary Uses of D.W. Winnicott. Ed. Peter L. Rudnytsky. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993: 40-49. Bradshaw, John. Healing the Shame that Binds You. Florida: Health Communications, 1988. Burdein, Inna et al. “Experiments on the Automaticity of Political Beliefs and Attitudes” Political Psychology. Special Issue: Experiments in Political Psychology. 27.3 (Jun 2006): 359-371. Chowdorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. California: University of California Press, 1978. Eggleton, David. “Growing up Disowned.” Listener 167.3062 (Jan 16 1999): 42. Hannah Manning118 Fintzy, T. Robert. “Vicissitudes of the Transitional Object in a Borderline Child.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 52 (1971): 107-111. Fox, Alistair. “The Effects of the ‘Bad Mother’ in the Fiction of Alan Duff: Both Sides of the Moon, One Night out Stealing, and the Heke Trilogy.” The Ship of Dreams: Masculinity in Contemporary New Zealand Fiction. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2008. 189-205. Gilligan, James. Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996. Heim, Otto. “Fall and Response: Alan Duff’s Shameful Autoethnography.” Postcolonial Text 3.4 (2007): 1-17. --. Writing Along Broken Lines: Violence and Ethnicity in Contemporary Maori Fiction. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1998. Horney, Karen. Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis. New York: Norton and Company, 1945. Joyce McDougall. “Narcissus in Search of a Reflection.” Plea for a Measure of Abnormality. New York: International University Press, 1980. 299-335. --. Theaters of the Mind: Illusion and Truth on the Psychoanalytic Stage. New York: Basic Books, 1985. Kilmartin. Christopher T. The Masculine Self. 2nd ed. Crawfordsville: R.R. Donnelley and Sons Company, 2000. Laing, R. D. The Divided Self: an Existential Study into Sanity and Madness. London: Tavistock Publications, 1960. Lewis, Helen Block. “Introduction: Shame the ‘Sleeper’ in Psychopathology.” Introduction. The Role of Shame in Symptom Formation. Ed. Helen Block Lewis. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1987. 1-28 Hannah Manning119 ---. Shame and Guilt in Neurosis. New York: International Universities Press, 1971. Lewis, Michael. Shame: The Exposed Self. New York: The Free Press, 1992. Prentice, Chris. “Articulations of Violence and Ethnicity.” JNZL (1991): 161-162. Scheff, Thomas J. “The Shame-Rage Spiral: A Case Study of an Interminable Quarrel”. Ed. Helen Block Lewis. The Role of Shame in Symptom Formation.. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1987. 109-149. Tangney, June Price, and Ronda, L.Dearing. Shame and Guilt. New York: The Guilford Press, 2002. Walker, Ranginui. “Eat Your Heart out Alan Duff.” Metro (1993): 136-137. Winnicott, D.W. Playing and Reality. London: Travistock Publications, 1971. ---. The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. London: The Hogarth Press, 1965. ---. “The Location of Cultural Experience.” Transitional objects and Potential Spaces:Literary uses of D.W. Winnicott. Ed. Peter L. Rudnytsky. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 3-12. Wright, John, et al. “Self-destructive and Delinquent Behaviours.” Violence and Victims 19.6 (Dec 2004): 627-643. NOTE: THIS IS NOT MY WORK