<p>Topic: Is identity something people are born with or given, or is it something people create for themselves? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.</p>
<p>Essay: Identity is the core of the human ego, the way in which we express ourselves and how the world comes to view us. It is something that is predominantly formed through our experiences and memories, as opposed to an inherent quality that came with us through birth. This can be viewed most explicitly through the study of literature, which deals keenly with the recurring theme of identity and how it is formed.</p>
<p>In the late Nineteenth century through to the early Twentieth century, Victorian Literature was made an active mode of identity formation by the Emprire. Literature then was used as a building block of societal identities, especially between those of the gender kind. Traditionally masculine roles were commonly expounded upon in Militant literature, while traditionally feminine roles like the romanticism of femininity and motherhood were found predominantly within feminine forms of literature. All of these were in a bid to educate and inculcate strict gender identity frameworks within the general populous. The educative efforts by the Empire paid off and strict gender demarcations were created successfully within the Victorian society.</p>
<p>The formation of identity is also a recurring theme in mordern Twenty-first century literature. An example of which includes the bildungsroman novel, Soul Mountain by Xingjian Gao - the story of an unknown protagonist who, out of the throes of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s, travels through the mountains of the Sichuan province in search of himself. Eventually, through the passage of his identity-searching journey, he gains a keener and deeper knowledge of himself. And as we watch how the protagonist develops, it is possible to note that ‘identity’ is eventually something that we can create for ourselves - almost pliable and malleable, neither given to us nor fixed in stone.</p>
<p>Through the aforementioned examples, we can note how identity is a dynamic, as opposed to static, entity. It is in a constant state of flux, influenced by our worldly perceptions, visceral understandings and experiences along this journey of growth, change and development.</p>