A Study On Female Images In Sula And Song Of Solomon From The Perspective Of Feminist Archetypal Criticism

As the first African American Nobel Prize winner in literature, Toni Morrison exerts a great influence upon the literary world, which marks the beginning of the African American Writers especially the black female writers by the mainstream reading public and literary field. Morrison writes a lot of novels which reflect many rebellious black female images. These black women express Morrison's struggle against the Whites'value system and the patriarchal culture. She wants to quest for the Blacks'self identity and the restoring of Afro-American traditional culture. Meanwhile, Morrison is affected by both the western white culture and black traditional culture. So she utilizes both of these two cultures to build these black female images in her novels. Sula and Song of Solomon are her important masterwork, in which she portrays the typical rebellious black women as Sula, Eva, Pilate, and Circe.This paper seeks to apply the feminist archetypal criticism to analysis the female images in Toni Morrison's novels Sula and Song of Solomon. On one hand, she focuses on the female Goddess archetypes in both western myth and African American culture in the hope to oppose the patriarchal repression of women and ensure the blacks'returning and preserving to the African tradition. On the other hand, Morrison tries to search for the future of black women and black culture. She tries to reconstruct the traditional view of value and culture through uniting these two cultures, and to find a harmonious balance between black male and female, between black culture and White culture.The paper consists of four parts.Chapter one begins with a brief introduction to the author Toni Morrison and her major works. And then it introduces the main contents of these two novel Sula and Song of Solomon. This chapter also summarizes literary review on Sula and Song of Solomon from both home and abroad.Chapter two is an introduction of the theories of archetypal criticism and feminist criticism. And these two theories combined as the feminist archetypal criticism which is a very important component part of the third wave feminist movement.Chapter three is the most important part of the paper. It intends to analyze the feminist archetypes in Sula and Song of Solomon. In Sula, Morrison uses the archetype of Lilith in the western myth to create Sula and explores the traditional Afro-American myth of Great Mother to portray the female figure Eva. Meanwhile, in Song of Solomon, Morrison portrays the black female figure of Pilate, a counterpart of Tree Goddess, and utilizes the goddess of Circe in Greek myth Odyssey to mold her own Circe. She wants to reconstruct these female archetypes to quest for the Blacks'self identity, to restore of the traditional Afro-American culture, and to find a harmonious balance between black male and female, between black culture and White culture.Chapter four is the conclusion. First, it summarizes these female figures in Sula and Song of Solomon by applying the theory of feminist myth criticism. And then, by finding the female images which are portrayed through using the feminist archetypal criticism, we can know that Morrison wants to recall the black women to quest for self identity and renaissance of tradition. She supports the idea that black women should combine the quest for gender equality and cultural returning. They should also link the traditional African American culture with the western white culture to find a harmonious balance.