Belonging In Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne Of Green Gables

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The idea of a sense of belonging can be appreciated since human beings start to interact with each other. According to some psychologists like Maslow (1962), children start to interact with one another searching for a place to fit in, and when this is not fulfilled it starts to affect their well-being. Feeling personally accepted, respected and included is a primary need for humans, especially children and young adults.

This topic can be observed in Lucy Maud Montgomery's first novel Anne of Green Gables, which is about a little orphan girl who arrives at Green Gables by mistake and gains everyone's trust and sympathy creating a place in the world for herself where she can feel that she belongs. In the novel one can see that Anne is looking …show more content…

According to psychology this is a human need as important as the need for food and shelter, due to the fact that the feeling that belonging creates helps seeing the value in life coping with intensely painful emotions (Hall, 2014). As reported by Hall (2014) a single instance of being excluded can undermine self-control and well-being; which can be shown when Gilbert hassled Anne by grabbing her hair and screaming carrots, and Anne immediately lashed out and hit him with her slate. The incident occurred in the first part of the book when Anne was starting to find her place and feeling accepted, this feeling of exclusion make her lose control proving the point of Hall.

In 2011, between 15 and 20 % of adolescents in Mexico suffered from depression, having as its main reason bullying (Huerta, 2011). This can be related to lack of sense of belonging, usually when children suffer from bullying is because they are forced to believe they are different giving them a feeling of incomprehension which it pushes them away from society and from everything, provoking emotional pain. The child exposed to bullying will become emotionally imbalanced suggesting the lack of sense of belonging make the child feel unwanted as Anne when she first arrived with the

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