英语论文哪里有？本论文通过突出她对911后仇外心理和全球化自由市场导致的2008年后经济萧条中移民生活的描述，本论文中的讨论可能会提供一种洞察力，让我们超越对她伦敦小说的主要后殖民阅读，深入了解移民在史密斯的伦敦空间叙事中的困境。因此，脆弱性的概念可以用来分析她关于移民的其他作品。
Chapter 1 Situational Vulnerability of Northwest Dwellers
1.1 Xenophobic Closure in Northwest London
Northwest London, with its attached prejudice and poverty, is a black hole that “draws its characters repeatedly back into its closed and classed overdetermination” (Arnett 3). This section illustrates the closure in the secluded home, exclusive office and discriminated council estates (a kind of social housing), to analyze the xenophobia and immobility faced by immigrants.
A home is a private place, “an intimate place of rest where a person can withdraw from the hustle of the world outside and have some degree of control over what happens within a limited space…where you can be yourself” (Seamon 150), and also “a vessel in which a tangle of abstract, cultural concepts is found” (Gathorne-Hardy 124). The homes of Willesden people in NW are characterized by narrowness, disorder and seclusion, represented by the house of Lloyd Cooper (father of Felix Cooper) which has “NO DOORBELL” (Smith, NW 104), giving away the disfunction of its owner’s life and suggesting a “new level of surrender” (104) towards a reality that has various suffocating aspects.
Chapter 2 Pathogenic Vulnerability of Northwest Precariats
2.1 Instrumentalized Marriages after Neoliberal Traumas
The novel presents Leah Hanwell and Natalie Blake’s pathogenic vulnerability in their instrumentalized marriages caused by traumatic experiences as social underdogs in the capitalist market. Through marrying high, Natalie outgrew her humble beginnings in Caldwell while Leah made a desperate move into marriage to cope with her existential anxiety. Therefore, their marriages doomed by utilitarian intentions or nihilistic imprudence are dysfunctional and disturbing in lack of mutual understanding and sincerity, which further disempowers them and leads to emotional disorder and even mental breakdown.
Natalie Blake views marriage as a social ladder through which she manages to overcome familial, class and race barriers. As a result, her marriage with Frank De Angelis from an affluent Italian family features an unscrupulous pragmatism. Raised up in a Jamaican plumber family, poverty is Natalie Blake’s first language. When the phone did not ring with news “of pipes leaking or backed-up toilets” (Smith, NW 178) for her father to repair, a strong anxiety would flood the small flat of her family. Natalie suffered a disturbing insecurity in a financially unstable family in childhood, which promotes her to seek economic security in men “socio-economically and culturally alien to her” (211) intentionally. Therefore, Natalie’s attraction to Frank generates first and for most from his aura of relaxing effortlessness with his Ralph Lauren wardrobe and indescribable accent that point to his privileged social and economic status. Smith ironically names Natalie’s marriage with Frank as a three-act play— “The invention of Love” in episode 69, 88 and 91, implying that it is a delicate scheme by Natalie.
Chapter 3 Corporeal Vulnerability of Northwest Individuals
3.1 Nonautonomous Subjects in Neoliberal Gender Norms
Female protagonists’ corporeal vulnerability to hegemonic neoliberal gender norms is presented through their repressed subjectivity in motherhood and sexuality. Writing about the issue of subjectivity, Judith Butler explains that “the self delimits itself, and decides on the material for its self-making, but the delimitation that the self performs takes place through norms which are, indisputably, already in place” (“Rethinking Vulnerability” 225), thus, subjectivity is vulnerable to “the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effect that it names” (“Gender Trouble” 2). In the novel, Smith shows Natalie and Leah’s repressed subjectivity implied in the very ideas of motherhood and heterosexuality which represent the patriarchal gender norms and neoliberal logic of assimilation.
Leah’s spiritual crisis in the novel is mostly caused by motherhood. Nancy Chodorow corroborates that those “behaviors that sabotage fertility and pregnancy…meet up with an unconscious belief and commitment with time standing still” (103). Leah’s wish for stillness and fears of losing herself and her identity result in a rejection of motherhood which she equals to definiteness and death. However, she is constantly pressured into motherhood by her own mother, husband and female colleagues. Though she rejects from the bottom of her heart the image of “normal woman”, whereby woman is understood as an essentialist category, and the “institution of motherhood as compulsory for women” (Butler, “Gender Trouble” 92), Leah tries to behave as “normal women do” (Smith, NW 35) when being with her colleagues. After finding out that she is pregnant, she has her third abortion. But Leah’s concerns over reproduction do not end with the abortion. She has to act to agree with her husband to have a child.
3.2 Unauthentic Selves in Postcolonial Identity Politics
As second-generation immigrants, the protagonists’ vulnerability to identity anxiety is also attributed to postcolonial and neoliberal globalization that searches for sameness and eliminates otherness. In NW, Natalie and Leah are “so overwhelmed by their inauthenticity” (Miller 184) in face of the contemporary search for authenticity in a global world where everything and everybody tends towards sameness. Behind this “assiduous documentation and defense of the authentic lies an unarticulated anxiety of losing the subject” (Cheng 5). In their case of migrant or diasporic subjects, their identity anxiety is the result of a struggle between integrating into the British national identity or maintaining their origin and self.
Natalie’s unsettled identity of being British or being Jamaican is intimately connected with issues of British national identity. Changing her name from Keisha with a strong African flavor into “Natalie”, a name suggesting more British whiteness, Natalie tries to shake off the ethnical imagination and prejudice attached to the name. In order to achieve an authentic identity, Natalie, receiving advice as a law pupil, distances herself professionally from her past and other ethnic minorities lest she be confused with her clients. Natalie’s transformation, from “an accidental guest at the table” to “a host, with other hosts” (Smith, NW 220) in her Queen’s Park house which is just far enough to avoid the old estate, seems to have constructed a British, authentic identity for her. However, it is revealed in the novel that the British society in postcolonial melancholia still keeps emphasizing her roots and opposing her when Natalie is held back by her skin color and Jamaican origin in workplace and in the court to add credits to the Jamaican victim’s family.
Conclusion
In her lecture at the New York Public Library in December 2008, Zadie Smith passionately called for attention to the plight of contemporary immigrants who are “tragically split…between worlds, ideas, cultures, voice”, worrying about “whatever will become of them? Something’s got to give—one voice must be sacrificed for the other. What is double must be made singular” (“Speaking in Tongues” 145). Four years later, NW came out as her most concrete account of the melancholic struggles of immigrants in the socio-economic and ethno-political troubles of the early twenty-first century. In this novel, her special engagement with various complexities that immigrants confront in London makes immigrants’ vulnerability a key issue in this work.
This thesis is first and foremost inspired by academic discussions on human vulnerability. Despite the general undertheorization of the concept of vulnerability, it is generally recognized both as an ontological condition of human being and a socially induced condition that some individuals and populations, exposed to social and political violence and the ills associated with poverty, are disproportionately precarious. Immigrants in the London presented in NW are undeniably vulnerable.
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