lucy wants the d

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Recommended: Essays on identity in literature

Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci released Stealing Beauty in 1996. Stealing Beauty is a film about Lucy Harmon, a young woman who is trying to discover the identity of her biological father and lose her virginity in Italy after the suicide of her mother. This film is a coming of age story, which lends itself to concepts in social psychology, such as formation of the self, relationships, and the underlying schemas necessary to form self identity and have sexual relations. The purpose of this paper is to describe and evaluate psychological theories relevant to how Lucy's search for her biological father and a suitor worthy of her phsyical affection impacts her self identity.
In order to understand the context of the film, a brief summary of events will be given. After the suicide of her poet mother, 19-year old American Lucy Harmon travels to the Tuscan countryside to spend time at the Italian home of her mother's old friends. Living in the house is Irish scultor, Ian, his British wife, Diana, an Italian columnist, Noemi, a dying playwright, Alex, and a Frenchman, Monsieur Guillaume. Diana's daughter, Miranda, is visiting for the holiday, along with her boyfriend Richard. Lucy intends to learn the identity of her biological father and hopes to lose her virginity to Niccolo Donati, whom she met four years earlier and was the first boy she kissed. Lucy later meets Carlo Lisca, a former war correspondent, who she thinks might be her biological father. With Alex, she discusses the cryptic poem her mother left and what she desires from the trip. Lucy overhears the adults discussing boys that they could help her meet, which upsets her. Lucy is on the phone to book tickets back home, when Diana's son, Christopher, arrives from Turke...

... middle of paper ...

...negative result. Lucy thus sees herself as less experienced and from her encounters feels humiliation.
Thus it is seen how Lucy's search for her biological father and a suitor worthy of her phsyical affection impacts her self identity. Lucy desires to satisfy curiousity about her background and her mother's by finding out who her biological father is, which forces revision of her self-schema. Her self schema is also impacted more significantly by her search for her first sexual partner. Lucy's hopes, dreams, and past experiences help guide her toward engaging in a meaningful first sexual encounter. Her experiences are reflective of results seen in studies on virgins and their attitudes towards loss of virginity. The environment also plays a part in her feeling stimatized as a virgin, which impacts her self perception and actions taken towards losing her virginity.

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