Approaching the Ideal Self through Love: Lacan’s objet petit a and Representations of Love in The Color Purple, Poor Things, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Using Jacques Lacan’s theories of subjectivity, this dissertation analyses the relationships between the ideal selves and the romantic desires of characters in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondous Life of Oscar Wao. Lacan argues that there is an inherent lack in all human beings, stemming from incompleteness and early helplessness, and emp