The Sad Stories Of Mothers And Daughters

Toni Morrison, the first black woman to receive Nobel Prize in Literature, has published eight novels from The Bluest Eye in 1970 to love in 2003. For all the multiplicity and magnitude of issues that have been addressed by Morrison, the mother-daughter relationship is a recurring theme and throughout Morrison's fictions, the stories of mothers and daughters are almost always bitter ones full of blood and tears. Based on close textual analyses, this thesis intends to analyze how the mother-daughter relationship has been fractured by social factors and how the twisted and distant mother-daughter relationship affects the black daughter's self-development in Sula.Structurally, the present thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One and Chapter five are introduction and conclusion. In the introduction, besides the presentation of the literature review of Sula, I focus on theoretical speculations by some representative American feminists, such as feminist Nancy Chodorow and Patricia Hill Collins, on motherhood and mother-daughter relationship. Chapter Two and Chapter Three are my analysis of the complicated mother-daughter relationships in Sula. Chapter Four explores, through the examples of Nel and Sula, black daughter's bitter journey of self-development. My conclusion underscores the fact that in the light of Morrison's fictional representation, there are deep-seated social and cultural meanings behind the twisted and distant mother-daughter relationship. Black mothers, Morrison's text seems to suggest, should reexamine their identities in a racially oppressive dominant society and pass on their African American cultural tradition to develop self-love and love for their children in order to avoid the twisted and alienated mother-daughter relationship. Black daughters, on the other hand, can arrive at a healthy self by listening to the story of the mother's generation and by retaining the African American cultural heritage vital to self emancipation and empowerment.