Mental Enslavement In The Process Of Ethical Place-Making:A Critique On Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

This thesis aims at analyzing how four female characters in A Mercy written by Toni Morrison,Lina,Rebekka,Sorrow,Florens,mentally enslave themselves in ethical placemaking processes on the farm,so as to uncover what Toni Morrison tries to utter on female subjectivity construction to the modern society.According to the analysis,all of the four females have mentally enslaved themselves in horizontal or vertical ethical place-making on a democratic farm,while among them two females Sorrow and Florens eventually mentally emancipate themselves as the ethical placemaking process continues.Detailed analysis reveals that their mental enslavement or eventual emancipation in ethical place-making is synthetically influenced by political imaginaries and feminist care ethics as well as some other personal factors.Through analysis,this thesis finds that through four females’ mental enslavement in ethical place-making Morrison discloses that what mentally enslaves the four females and what mentally emancipates them are the same source,namely the ethics associated with all identities and thus the essence of subjectivity construction is the ethical decoding and encoding of self-identities.Mental enslavement and subjectivity are easily transferred to each other.Accordingly,Morrison points out that subjectivity construction is every social participant’s job rather than a certain race’s or gender’s duty and further configures a twoway mechanism to construct subjectivity,one of which is social participation or human connection and the other is history renewal.Meanwhile,by noting the ethical interference of place identities in the form of political imaginary in ethical place-making processes and mutual openness between present and past,Morrison further points out the ethical correlation of all identities,the fact of which facilitates a merge of different place identities as a whole self.Thus,in Morrison’s opinion,subjectivity belongs to the one who can communicate who he\she was yesterday,is at present and will be in the future,which is Morrison’s plan on subjectivity construction.