Magic Realism In Morrison’s Beloved

Toni Morrison is a significant African American woman writer in the20th century. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in1993. In2001she was named one of the "30Most Powerful Women in America" by Ladies’ Home Journal. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogues and richly detailed black characters. Among the best known are her novels The Bluest Eye(1970), Song of Solomon(1977) and Beloved(1988), which won the Pulitzer Price For Fiction in1988. Based on an actual historical incident, Beloved tells a story haunted by the daughter she murdered rather than have returned to slavery. The novel examines the mental and physical trauma caused by slavery as well as the lingering damage inflicted on its survivors. Many plots in the novel are perfectly represented to readers through magic realistic technique which greatly shows the artistry of the fiction and has aroused wide acclaim among reviewers and critics. Magic realism is a new approach to literary realism and a new artistic genre. Through the presentation of supernatural, imagined or magic elements as if they were real, magic realism finally aims at searching for the hidden meaning and real truth behind them. The adoption of magic realism in Beloved plays a critical role in conveying the themes, which extremely deserves detailed research. However, this field still remains unexplored till now. The real purpose of employing magic realism is to reveal reality. The reality which is not so easy to be solved in real life, especially the mental predicament of the characters in the fiction, can be perfectly reflected through magic techniques instead of realistic ones. The thesis focuses on the exploration of magic realism’s contribution to the perfect presentation of the themes in Beloved.Beloved was written based on the influence of slavery and of the emancipation of slaves on the black people. Through the employment of magic realism, the novel vividly describes the lives of some ex-slaves and exposes the oppression and devastating consequences slavery had, and continues to have, on their lives. After being freed, the slaves want to obtain their individual identities and collective humanity. However, the effects of slavery still haunt them, which prevents them from enjoying the present or thinking about the future. To these ex-slaves, the experiences of slavery are extremely painful, so most of them just repressed these memories in the hope of leaving behind the horrific past. The use of magic realism can successfully help the characters’repressed memories of the characters recur, which has eventually accomplished the reintegration of their selves.The accomplishment of this thesis owes much to the current studies on Beloved. Being another interpretation of the literary classic, the thesis aims at exploring the unique writing skills applied by Morrison in Beloved---magic realistic technique. The whole thesis is divided into five parts. To begin with, the thesis introduces Morrison and her masterpiece Beloved, a literature review relevant to this research thesis and an overview of the chapter organization. In chapter two, the thesis mainly focuses on the different reasons of Morrison’s choosing magic realism in her writing of the novel, including social and cultural elements and her strong desire for "curing" the black through the means of "rememory". Chapter three is an exploration into the concrete application of magic realism through the presentation and analysis of the three aspects (the blending of the magic and real, the adoption of mythological archetypes and the employment of symbolic images). Chapter four focuses on magic realism’s functions in the conveyance of the novel’s theme through the concrete analysis on the reality. Based on the foregoing chapters, the thesis comes to a conclusion in chapter five.