The Study Of Body Narrative In Toni Morrison’s Novels

Toni Morrison, born in1931, is considered and acknowledged as one of the most outstanding and influential contemporary African American writers. Most of her novels are highly concerned with the African Americans’ordinary life and their destiny, in which she expresses her calm and deep thought on the existence of the whole black race. She represents her profound thought with the characters depicted carefully as well as the narrative skills exquisitely performed in her novels, presenting her race care and humanistic concern in a highly artistic quality.This dissertation analyzes five novels of Morrison, excavating and exploring her thought of and reflection on the blacks and even the whole black race’s plight of existence from the perspective of the "Body Dimension". In Morrison’s fiction, the body of the characters is like a piece of canvas, on which she draws and engraves variety of complicated marks and codes. In the process of decoding, the body unfolds its own speech to such an extent that the experiences of the characters imprinted in the body are elaborated as well as the connation signified by the body emerged. We put forth that the body is represented as a non-linguistic language as well as a meaning-"difference" narrative in Morrison’s works.There are seven parts in this dissertation, including the introduction, chapter1-5and the conclusion.In the introduction part, we present the short introduction of Toni Morrison and the origin of this research, delineate the overseas and domestic study of Toni Morrison, and outline the narrative theories of body as well as the research approach and the main contents of this dissertation.Chapter one focuses on the study of The Bluest Eye. Firstly, through the analysis of this novel, we try to reveal that the body aesthetics of ugly black skin and beautiful white skin is essentially a cultural hegemony-based construction and prejudice. And then, by analysis of the tragic of the black girl Pecola who is finally mad because of her infatuation for the blue eyes of the whites and the story of her parents who disdain their black body, we reflect how the body aesthetics of beautiful whites bring the spiritual harm to the whole blacks as well as the identity lost of the blacks in the dominate white popular culture. Finally we analyze the activity of the little black girl Claudia who tears and destroys the white cloth dolls from the angle post-colonization theory to proclaim the author’s destruction and subversion of the body mythology considering the whites as the only beautiful. Chapter two focuses on the analysis of Sida. In this novel, through the depiction of Sula, we present that Morrison overturns and rewrites the rigid traditional imagination of black females. The author makes active use of the universal distortion of black females’ body’sexualization’in the traditional literature, and through Sula’s body adventure and experiment, Morrison shows that it is Sula’self-seeking and self-construction. We also present that Morrison’s description and analysis of Sula’s body birthmarks is to construct her identity and fulfill the black females’identity exploration. Chapter three analyzes Morrison’s reflection on the race return and race identity of African Americans through the reading of Song of Solomon. The first section will concentrate on the interpretation of Ruth and her daughters who imitate the lives of writes middle class, presenting the discipline of black females’ body and their mode of speech by analysis the signification of red velvet roses and the fate of Ruth and her daughters. The second section analyses the figure of Pilate, an attractive black female, putting forth the author’s identity with the black race hidden the depiction and interpretation of Pilate’s body without navel and her body language. The third section represents Morrison’s active attitude towards the African Americans’ race return through the decoding of black male Milkman’s body signification.Chapter four focuses on the analysis of Beloved. Section one reappears the insulted and damaged body of black slaves and their tragic history, speaks for the black slave individuals, and expresses the accusation of slavery. Section two analyzes Morrison’s construction of blacks’ subjectivity by using of the body politics consciousness. Morrison shows us that the blacks reconfigure themselves and their history by their only voices and body narratives. Section three analyses the significations of the Beloved’s The physical resurrection, summoning the historical memory of the characters in the novel as well as the readers’ reflection of the black history.Chapter five analyzes Morrison’s eighth novel love. In this novel, Morrison puts emphasis on the inner world of the black races, presenting us with the sexual oppression in the black races world and its influence on the plight of the female existence. We try to use Luce Irigaray’s body theory to analyze the phenomenon of commercialization of the black female’s body in the male-overwhelming world and present that how the genealogy of love between women has been coved and cut. Section two interprets the contemporary black female Junior’s desire body and reveals the lack behind the desire subject. Section three presents and puts forth the possibility of the integrity and the wholeness of the black existence by constructing the genealogy of love between females and exit the rigid eros and respect relationship between males and females dominated by the desire.From the The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved to love, we can see that Morrison firstly overturns and deconstructs the body aesthetics of ugly blacks and beautiful whites, constructs the subjectivity of black females by depicting their body adventure and experiment, signifies the body as a return to and identity with the black race, and then retraces and reconfigures the black history in order to exit the shadow of history, and finally reflects the wholeness of survival of the blacks. All of these can be seen as Morrison’s interpretation of her thought on the plight of the whole black race’s existence.