In her novel, When the Emperor was Divine, Julie Otsuka explores how people’s identity can be forced to change due to fear. Fear causes people to change because people may not be able to handle all of the pressure and stress. In the novel based around WWII, the family is split apart from each other. While the father goes to prison,the mother and the kids go to an internment camp close to Utah. While they are in the camp the pressure fear has put on all of them leads to an unstable life afterwards. Otsuka develops the character of the daughter in the novel to reveal that fear causes people to change their identity, which causes them to rebuild themselves as a person.
While on the train to the internment camp, the daughter starts to question her current identity and compares it to others. The girl then goes to the bathroom and begins to examine herself in the mirror, she saying that all she saw was, “ a plain girl in a plain blue scarf [...] then she smiled, but only just a little, and only at the corners of her mouth. She didn’t look like herself when she did that. She looked like her mother, only not as mysterious” (34). She is worrying about her looks because she doesn’t believe she is beautiful. The girl is already having thoughts of the standards of beauty and she doesn’t believe she fits them so she starts to try and change herself to look like others. The …show more content…
The relationship between these two is very direct, fear changes people’s identity, the fear on a person can either make or break a person like in the book. Everybody has their own identity that they can make depending on what they believe in or how they feel, fear is a such a strong feeling that it could change a person. Fear takes a big toll on people and depending on how that person handles it will result in a new identity for the person for the better or for the
While on the train to the internment camp, the daughter starts to question her current identity and compares it to others. The girl then goes to the bathroom and begins to examine herself in the mirror, she saying that all she saw was, “ a plain girl in a plain blue scarf [...] then she smiled, but only just a little, and only at the corners of her mouth. She didn’t look like herself when she did that. She looked like her mother, only not as mysterious” (34). She is worrying about her looks because she doesn’t believe she is beautiful. The girl is already having thoughts of the standards of beauty and she doesn’t believe she fits them so she starts to try and change herself to look like others. The …show more content…
The relationship between these two is very direct, fear changes people’s identity, the fear on a person can either make or break a person like in the book. Everybody has their own identity that they can make depending on what they believe in or how they feel, fear is a such a strong feeling that it could change a person. Fear takes a big toll on people and depending on how that person handles it will result in a new identity for the person for the better or for the