Signifying Enchantment In Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

Toni Morrison, one of the most influential African American writer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature with her rich imagination and poetic expression in the year of 1993. Her ninth novel, A Mercy was published in 2008 which mainly tells a story of a black slave Florence who seeks for her identity and for her true love. Besides Florence, other characters like Lord Jacob, Lady Rebecca, housekeeper Lena, as well as slave Sorrow in the novel are also splendid. Although these people are from different races, they constitute a large happy family with mutual love and respect. In A Mercy Morrison expresses the longing of the black females towards freedom and equality through rich images and languages.Based on the outstanding achievement of African-American culture, the rhetoric features of folk culture and psychological characteristics of the race, Henry Louis Gates Jr. puts forward a theory of African-American Literary Criticism – the Signifying Theory. The Signifying Theory is mainly reflected in three aspects, i.e. image signifying, language signifying and texts signifying. The former two refers to the use of particular images and language to express the meaning beyond the word, whereas the latter one refers to the African-American writers who deepen and develop the same theme through their different works. In terms of the understanding about Gate’s theory, it is easy to find that the signifying of images, signifying of language and signifying between texts in A Mercy are reflected clearly. The image signifying in A Mercy mainly can be discussed from the entity image and non-entity image which shows the characters’ pursuit for independent spirit and glamour of ancient African culture. And the language signifying focuses on the rhetoric device of pun about the implications of naming and the implied meaning of dialogue. The text signifying goes to the relations between A Mercy and Morrison’s other three works, i.e. the intertextuality between A Mercy and Beloved, the theme deepening of A Mercy’ to The Bluest Eyes and the rewriting to Paradise.Many scholars and critics at home and abroad have made a detailed interpretation on A Mercy, but no one analyzes the novel from signifying perspective. This paper provides a completely new perspective for study this novel by employing Gate’s signifying theory. And it explores Morrison’s special writings on female initiation and reveals her thinking about humanity and her love for the culture.