Loss And Reconstruction

Regarded as the"darkest"novel that goes right to the heart of the matter, Tony Morrison's Beloved is her most important novel and has won her much praise and honor during her career as a writer. Beloved tells a formerly enslaved woman's attempt to kill all her children rather than see them enslaved in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Law and thus is seemingly about excesses of mother love. Nevertheless, when probing into the fundamental causes of the infanticide's, readers have to admit that it should attribute to Sethe's radical resistance against the brutal slavery, and a desperate fighting for the self or the recognition of her identity as a human being.Accordingly, this research bears a burden to quest for African-American female identity. Significantly, considering that their identity as full individuals has been consistently denied to them by white colonialists, this research will thus read black females'self-actualization from the point of view of Homi Bhabha's"hybridity"and"colonial ambivalence"as well as Gloria Anzaldua's"mestiza consciousness"and"borderland", and will read it as a resistive process against objectifying colonial definitions of black identity. It further argues that the construction of black female identity has gone through a long way of sufferings and hardships, including both periods of loss and awakening, which are integrally intertwined with their body, name, love, community and their narrative of story-telling. Generally speaking, this research consists of three parts which comes between introduction and conclusion. It is structured as follows:The first chapter mainly discusses the black women's sufferings of transformation in their body, loss of name and deformed mother love that lead to a loss of the hybrid self. The second chapter focuses on black females'awakening which is shown or implied in their acts of resistance against the fixed definition of black women under slavery, in their desire for love and name, in their fear of disintegration, and in their acts of self salvation. The third chapter expounds on the importance of rememory and the key role the community plays in the reconstruction of Sethe's identity and that of Denver, and finally the possible reconstruction of black national identity.This research is expected to shed light on the researches of the novel and evokes people's concern about black females'fate as human beings. As a mestiza text, the novel forces readers to cross borders through a definition of rememory. Beloved, then, is a"voice"that, by disrupting the dominant discourse of national history, serves as an alternative ideological model for all descendents of a colonialist history.