Wednesday, November 27, 2013


Beautiful as the Day

In my thesis, I will discuss the trilogy novel by Edith Nesbit. One of them is “Five Children and It.” In that novel, in chapter 1 “Beautiful as the Day”, the children wanted to be “beautiful” and they asked to their Fairy Tale “Psammead” to grant their wish.
"I wish we were all as beautiful as the day” (Nesbit, 12)
Psammead granted “beautiful” to be “Grow up” and in the end when they came back to their home, Martha, who was their servant did not know them and drove away them. In “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” by Jacques Lacan, he said that “The child at an age when he is for a time, however short, outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can nevertheless already recognize as such his own image in a mirror”.  Although they still “child” but they can see themselves in the mirror or they looked each other to recognize themselves. Lacan, in his essay, also stated the child could recognize themselves in the child’s own body, and the persons and things around him. For example, the child from the age at 5 months, when at the age he should crawl on hands and knees, but he wanted to stand up. It showed that he (the child) saw he person around him who can stand even run, and he wanted to follow that person. It same with the children in the novel “Five Children and It”, they wanted to be beautiful when they saw people around them, and one of them is Martha (the servant). It seems they wanted to do by their own selves, then they did not know what to do so that they came back to their home, but Martha did not notice and drove away them.
There are some points in this first chapter of “Five Children and It” that I want to find out. Why they want to be beautiful as an adult? When they became adult, why Martha did not know them even drove away them? Is it related that an adult can make a lie but the child not?

sources:
Nesbit, E. (1993(reprint)). Five Children and It. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Edition
Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”.


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