A Study Of The Body In Toni Morrison's Novels From The Perspective Of Gender Politics

From the standpoint of modern politics theory,the most important aspect of gender is “gender politics”,which is closely related to body.Body is the battlefield for gender politics,no matter it is gender oppression or gender resistance,thus body becomes a medium for the presentation of various power relations.Gender politics involves the interactivity and the fluidity of the power,while body is the best presentation medium for power struggle and negotiation,as well as a well-chosen field for the interpretation of African American history and the pursuit of individual ethnic identity.The characters,in Toni Morrison's novels,are often wounded,scarred,or mutilated in some way.Those scarred bodies serve as a kind of tangible insignia symbolizing a violent history of oppression,in terms of gender,race,ethnicity,class,or sexuality.In each of Morrison's novels,body has functioned as a fleshly reminder of the paradoxical nature of an American citizenry built on the basis of the difference of ideology.The body is a crucial topic whenever Morrison takes gender and race into consideration,thus the body becomes an important and unavoidable research issue for the researchers of Morrison.Although researchers of Morrison have touched upon these two perspectives,namely gender politics and body,they haven't explored it fully and systematically.The articles relating to gender politics in Morrison's novels often focus on one of her novels.For example,some critics argue that Morrison discloses the forces of tyranny and explores the voices of the victimized in the novel Love.The research has been conducted on the body in Morrison's novels mainly from the aesthetic perspective.Therefore,this dissertation aims to conduct a systematic research on the body narrative and gender politics to prove that Morrison reconstructs the black subjectivity,reconnects the bonds between characters,and recovers the relationship between black male and female through the consciousness of body politics,and finally completes the construction of black identity and cultural identity.This dissertation analyses Morrison's eight novels: The Bluest Eye(1970),Song of Solomon(1977),Tar Baby(1981),Beloved(1987),Jazz(1992),Paradise(1998),A Mercy(2008),and the newly published God Help the Child(2015),exploring the strategies applied by Toni Morrison,in which she uses body metaphor as a means to encompass body,history and gender politics so as to present thoughtful descriptions of African Americans in slavery and after emancipation.For Morrison,the consciousness of the body politics plays a decisive role in the construction of the subjectivity for African Americans in specific historical period in American history.For African Americans,the body is an expression of their world,the visible form of their intentions,as well as an powerful instrument for them to resist oppression.Besides the introduction and the conclusion,this dissertation falls into four chapters:The introduction delineates the overseas and domestic study of Toni Morrison,discusses the definition and usage of the key words of this study,and explores the general bodily history of African Americans.Chapter One explores gender politics and the loss of subjectivity in The Bluest Eye and God Help the Child.The devastating mental and physical consequence of the denigration of the female body's inability to conform to standards of beauty,in an economy where beauty is synonymous with whiteness,degrades African Americans more in terms of body than of mind.Under the white beauty norms,the characters in Morrison's novels come to examine the reality of their physical bodies with disgust or even hatred,and believe the fantasy that the white world is the answer to all their problems.The lack of the white beauty plunges the character into a psychological abyss,which renders the character unable to function anymore as an emotionally healthy human.This dissertation states that for an individual,abandoning one's body means a disconnection to history,culture,voice and language,and that the consequence is the loss of subjectivity.Moreover,these standards also have devastating effects on African American community as a whole,because the light-skinned African Americans discriminate the dark-skinned one and the parents discriminate their dark-skinned children.Consequently,African American children,in Morrison's novels,learn about white culture,black community,and their own self-worth through the legacy of racial discrimination.After 45 years of Morrison's first novel,the newly published one offers curious reflections of the similarity of where she began in the first novel.The injustices of slavery and its consequences haven't been worked through,and the racial oppression remains a contemporary reality,the circle of abuse and violation repeats itself.Chapter Two probes into the discussion of Morrison's attempts to reconstruct the black subjectivity and reconnect the female bonds through the consciousness of body politics.The consciousness of body politics refers to the state of awareness of the individual consciously reconstructs his subjectivity via the body which is being controlled,disciplined,violated,used and misused.By analyzing Beloved,Paradise,and A Mercy,this chapter emphasizes that the process of reconstructing the female subjectivity is the process of discovering one's history as well as reconnecting the maternal bonds.In the process of reconstructing,memory and scarred bodies play a decisive role in retrieving the connections of body,identity,voice,language,and history.This dissertation emphasizes the importance of reconnecting the female bonds that have been cut off under slavery to place the individual in a dependent role to enforce the enslavement,because the individual can reconstruct the subjectivity in the collective cognition of black culture.Besides,within an African American context,black women have always taken their role as that of educator of the younger ones into the culture.The reconnection is achieved through the recognition of the wounds and scars on body.For while scars serve to mark each body as singular—literally indicating each body's difference,these scars also foreground an insistent collective history of slavery.Wounds and scars act as the vehicle through which female characters—across their differences—recognize their shared oppression,unite in female community and reclaim their bodies,histories,and subjectivities.Though scarred bodies are not symbols of resistance or empowerment,they can be recognized by others who have the same kind of traumatic experience;and then the scars serve as points of identification and connection.Chapter Three examines Morrison's attempts to reconnect the bonds between black male and female,and reconstruct black male subjectivity in the intimate relationship between them.Slavery vitiates family life.It is by destroying the black family under slavery that white America broke the will of the black people.Besides,the sexual exploitation of black female destroys the black men's masculinity,and they are emotionally and mentally emasculated.This chapter emphasizes that the bonds are reconnected through the intimate body contact,which allows the black man to express himself freely by using his body without restriction that has been abused,misused,scarred under the system of slavery.It is Beloved who arouses Paul D's sexuality and makes his dead body alive and his desire is being forged in new territory—the freedom of using his body.For the black male,finding his body freedom is not enough.The healing comes when he places his story next to the black woman's,which allows new interpretations arise from the interwoven old texts to create a different,fresh and hopeful future.Besides,the black man's rediscovery of his subjectivity is compounded by a new awareness of the importance of black women.The main character in Song of Solomon is male,but he becomes a complete man only because of the direct and indirect powerful influences of the women in his life.Moreover,Morrison's novels consistently affirm the power of love even in time of great tragedy and emphasize the need for them to construct,define,and create values about home and family because African American children,in Morrison's novels,learn about white culture,black communities,and their own self-worth through the legacy of racial discrimination.Chapter Four concerns the black body as the site of history.Self-creation and the reformation of a fragmented historical past are infinitely entwined for African Americans.Therefore,African American literature should be viewed as a genealogical poem that attempts to restore continuity to the rupture or discontinuities imposed by the history of African American presence in America.The body,as a site of history,is strikingly apparent in Beloved,Paradise,and Jazz.By exploring the experience of slavery and its aftermath,Morrison's works trace the lives of African Americans from the Middle Passage to the contemporary period.Within the novels,the characters store personal and familial traumas of loss and abuse which later act out on their bodies,further proving that the body is an active agent in remembering the history.The return to the Middle Passage is the recovery of the nearly lost body of history,and the body lost to this history is central to the novel and to Morrison's particular project of reconstituting a cultural memory which is crucial in resisting the racial memory.Through the above analysis of Morrison's eight novels,this dissertation tentatively proves that the body in Morrison's novels plays a decisive role for African Americans to pursuit individual and ethnic identity,as well as to record and present their history.The body in Morrison's novels becomes the site on which the gender politics is inflicted,the collective memories are carved,and the black histories are located.The body inscribes the history of African Americans,thus becoming another way of recording and presenting history.Significantly,Morrison does not consistently depict the racial and sexual oppressions that African Americans suffered,rather than focus on various power struggles of negotiation,communication and competition between black and white,male and female,therefore,the body in Morrison's novels bearing the characteristics of fluidity and interactivity,and implies rich cultural and political thought.The body acts as the holder of trauma,whether initiated by physical abuse,discrimination,exclusion,dehumanization,or abandonment;meanwhile,the body offers a potential for recognition,resistance,and healing.In brief,the dissertation tentatively proves that the consciousness of the body politics plays a decisive role for Morrison to reconstruct the black subjectivity and cultural identity.