3.2. Sara’s Status before Self-actualization 8

3.3. The Factors Driving Sara’s Self-actualization 8

3.3.1. Psychological Implication 8

3.3.2. Help from the Indian Gentleman 9

3.4. The Manifestations of Sara’s Self-actualization 9

4. Conclusion 10

References 11

1. Introduction

1.1. Frances Burnett and A Little Princess

Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett is a playwright and author who is best known for her children's stories, in particular Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden. “The inner secret in growth”or “growing up with the inner secret” is always the eternal theme of Frances Hodgson Burnett, which can obviously be seen in her representative work A Little Princess, whose topic is Sara’s growing up in adversity and becoming a little princess in other people’s hearts.  

The main plot of A Little Princess is that seven-year-old Sara is sent to Miss Minchin's boarding school to study. She is very clever, polite, and creative. Everyone treats her like a princess. Miss Minchin is secretly jealous and dislikes Sara for her cleverness, but openly praises and flatters her because of her father's wealth. However, her father’s sudden death and bankruptcy make her become a penniless orphan. Thus, Sara turns to be a school servant in order to pay for the living. She suffers hunger, coldness and neglect. However, she is strong-minded and self-disciplined that she faces the difficulties optimistically and tries her best to help others. She is a little princess in many people’s eyes because of her kindness and caring for others.

1.2. Abraham Maslow and Theory of Hierarchy of Needs

Abraham Harold Maslow, a famous American psychologist, who is best known for putting forward his theory of hierarchy of needs. There are five needs, namely physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging needs, esteem needs and the need for self-actualization in the theory which can help a person realize his self-actualization from the lower needs to the higher needs. According to Maslow, all inpiduals have the tendency to realize his full potential and health, that is the trend towards self-actualization, which is defined “as ongoing actualization of potentials, capacities and talents, as fulfillment of mission, as a fuller knowledge of and acceptance of, the person’s own intrinsic nature, as an unceasing trend towards unity, integration or synergy within the person” (Maslow, 1997: 31).  

According to the theory of hierarchy of needs, there are two categories of human beings’ needs: the deficiency needs and the being needs. The deficiency needs refer to the most fundamental and basic four levels of needs, basically the needs for physiology, safety, love and belonging, and esteem. The being needs is the need to fulfill one’s being, that is the need for self-actualization, which comes out only after all the deficiency needs are satisfied to some extent. Only when the lower needs are relatively satisfied will the next higher level needs come out. 

1.3. The Background and the Significance of the Thesis

There are many literature researches about A Little Princess. However, most of them talk about Sara’s qualities and her influences on other people, the differences about the different editions of A Little Princess and how to translate the A Little Princess into Chinese. So far, no one has used Maslow’s theory of hierarchy to analyze the growth of Sara in A Little Princess. Thus, Maslow’s theory of hierarchy provides us with a new perspective to analyze Sara’s growth and her psychologies during different periods of her life. Based on the theory of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, this paper aims to analyze Sara’s different needs at her different stages of growth in different growing environment and how Sara achieves self-actualization from a wealthy princess envied by many people to a poor princess who remains all her qualities despite of the hard environment.