Distorted Development of Sexual Identity or Psyche: a Portrait of Lenny in Ice-Candy-Man

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Distorted Development of Sexual Identity or Psyche: A Portrait of Lenny in Ice-Candy-Man As I read the novel Ice-Candy-Man by Bapsi Sidhwa, numerous themes embedded into the piece of literature emerged one by one, and one theme that is pervasive in the novel, spanning throughout its entirety from beginning till the end is Lenny’s development: her initiation into the society’s norms, hierarchies, prejudices, her understanding of the things around her, and most importantly, her discovery of the world of sexuality and her understanding of her own. The novel is an account of Lenny’s coming of age along with being a partition story. As the novel progresses we get detailed insights into the factors that shape her journey towards her puberty and the formation of her sexual psyche. Psychological research shows, as I will point out in more detail in subsequent paragraphs, that pre-pubescent children, even infants and toddlers, are sexual beings. Though they lack understanding of its significance or connotations, they can process the pleasure associated with it. Children and their peers often explore each other, and play with their genitals, and this is considered a normal or even healthy way of leading up to a child’s adolescence and in subsequent years, her/his sexual psyches. However, at the present time, it is not only children playfully exploring themselves and their peers; rather, a lot of other factors intrude in forming the idea of physically intimate relationships in a child’s mind. Common examples of these would include movies, cartoons, comic-books and video-games with women characters that are portrayed in an over-sexualized way. Other factors include sexual abuse by adults or older children and behavior of other grown-up people around the child, and both these things are what influence Lenny the most. While self-exploration is considered normal, these are not;

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