No matter how much we run, jump or pray, we cannot escape change. In the same ways that we experience radical forms of change, Sister Ursula from Justin Russo’s The Whore’s Child experiences them too. After constructing a false sense of hope to get her through the first stages of her life(the little girl identity), Ursula confronts this sense of hope as she moves into the last stage of her life (the big girl identity). This transformation from one identity to the next shows us just how realizations change and shape the people that we become.
Our first look at Ursula from the little girl perspective is shown as part of the first assignment Ursula submits: a twenty-five-page account of her life. Raised in a convent that strips her of childhood freedoms, Sister Ursula’s treatment is based upon her parents’ social and financial statuses or their lack thereof. This social system of treatment is our first view of Ursula’s inability to choose or what James Marcia would define as identity diffusion. Being “dropped off,” Ursula has no say in her caretaker, and she certainly has no voice when it comes to her treatment. Ursula’s initial action is to accept all directions with no backlash. The only thing that Ursula has for herself is the hope that she …show more content…
Clinging to her fantasy of hope, Ursula makes her first commitment to become a nun without any critical thought. She simply chooses this option because she thinks it is the best way for her to be rescued, and she uses it as an entrance into the later years of her life, the intimacy vs. isolation stage. In this new life, Ursula still maintains her little girl identity because she has not given up her inflated sense of hope. Ursula believes that her rescue is dependent upon her commitment to god and her “nunship” that she embarks on out of hate; therefore, the only real commitment Ursula makes is the one to her fantasy of
Our first look at Ursula from the little girl perspective is shown as part of the first assignment Ursula submits: a twenty-five-page account of her life. Raised in a convent that strips her of childhood freedoms, Sister Ursula’s treatment is based upon her parents’ social and financial statuses or their lack thereof. This social system of treatment is our first view of Ursula’s inability to choose or what James Marcia would define as identity diffusion. Being “dropped off,” Ursula has no say in her caretaker, and she certainly has no voice when it comes to her treatment. Ursula’s initial action is to accept all directions with no backlash. The only thing that Ursula has for herself is the hope that she …show more content…
Clinging to her fantasy of hope, Ursula makes her first commitment to become a nun without any critical thought. She simply chooses this option because she thinks it is the best way for her to be rescued, and she uses it as an entrance into the later years of her life, the intimacy vs. isolation stage. In this new life, Ursula still maintains her little girl identity because she has not given up her inflated sense of hope. Ursula believes that her rescue is dependent upon her commitment to god and her “nunship” that she embarks on out of hate; therefore, the only real commitment Ursula makes is the one to her fantasy of