Finding mothers: Reconstruction of African American motherhood, family, community, and history in Toni Morrison's fiction

In this dissertation, I examine Toni Morrison's seven novels, focusing on how her characters recover from mother loss and move toward healing. Morrison shows that many of her characters go through mother loss, and examines that loss within the context of African Americans' collective loss of their motherland. She creates familial or communal relationships as a way for her characters to overcome their losses, and finds the driving force to create connectedness and kinship by sharing their history with other characters. My reading of Morrisori's stories of mother loss is that as the loss leads individuals to develop a strategy for survival and protection, the mother loss prevalent in Morrisori's works underlies the female characters' strong desire for connection. Furthermore, this desire fuels Morrisori's narratives which aim to create collectivity and connectedness of family, friends, community, and history out of grieving individuals.;Examining her characters' "double consciousness," their cultural orphanhood, their being possessed with their past loss, and the way they resort to the insularity of a community for their sense of self as individualized effects of slavery and racism, Morrison seeks different relational paradigms for African Americans to recover from personal losses and the collective loss of motherland and to work for future development of their history and culture in relation to those of other races and cultures. I see the basic framework of Morrisori's works as that of a survivor's mourning for the one who did not survive or for the one who left. Drawing on Judith V. Jordan and Janet L. Surrey's theory of empathy and Jessica Benjamin's account of mutual intersubjectivity, I examine the identification process by which Morrison's characters cope with loss by entering into an empathic relationship with the lost ones, with themselves, and with others who have experienced similar losses. Psychoanalytic theories' complementary dual unity in their conception of the psychic world from a subject's relation to its object shows the structure of domination. Empathic relationships in Morrison's works can serve as a relational paradigm that opens room for mutual intersubjectivity in interpersonal relationships and in making connections with the outer world.