Inerasable Black Imprint

Toni Morrison is one of the most important black female writers in the literature history of America and even of the whole world. There is no penetrating criticism or resentful denouncement on slavery or the White society in her books. Instead, her books are all the tragedies of the distortion and aberration of the black people's spiritual world after they were oppressed and tortured by slavery. Once her representative work Beloved was published, it shocked the American literary circles and was considered a monument of the history of African Americans.The thesis applied ethnic minority psychology into character comprehending and analyzed in details their characteristics, fate and struggle. The thesis aims at disclosing the destructive influence slavery exerted on both the physical and mental aspects of black people through applying this theory and its latest research results into analyzing the text.This thesis is made up of five chapters. The first chapter is introduction. It introduced the life and works of the writer and also mentioned the latest researches at home and abroad in this field.Chapter two tells the slavery and its influence on the writer. It firstly introduced the history of slavery and its influence on the whole American society and secondly tells its influence on the writer and the writer's challenge to the system in turn.Chapter three applied ethnic minority psychology in to practice. The first part is the introduction of this theory and its latest research results and then it comes to the process of applying. No matter what it is kind Baby, loving Sethe or courageous Denver, they lost the basic condition as a human being under the oppression of slavery, that is, freedom. There is obvious characteristic of being oppressed in the nature of these women, and even of the whole black people.Chapter four discussed the struggle of three characters and the reasons of their doomed failure. Baby's imagination about color during the last period of her life gave her comfort. Sethe's killing her baby displayed her awakening awareness to a certain extent. And Denver's growth and behavior of saving her mother seemingly enabled her get rid of the influence of slavery. However, their struggle couldn't_change the inferior status of black people in American society, until nowadays. Their fate is determined by slim ethnic identification, deep-rooted colorism and negative stereotype threat.And the last chapter is the conclusion and summary of the whole thesis. It emphasized the great influence of slavery on the black people, especially the destructive influence on their mental world, causing people to reconsider the social problem of ethnic minorities.