On The Theme Of Initiation In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye And A Mercy

As a humanistic female novelist, Toni Morrison insists on concerning about the weak and marginalized black children especially the little black girls'growing process. Morrison's first novel The Bluest Eye unfolds the hard initiation of the most vulnerable black girl-Pecola who is under the devastating effect of the white-dominated standard of beauty. Being Morrison's latest novel, A Mercy narrates four different racial female growing experiences of Lina, Rebekka, Sorrow, and Florens. Each of them is discarded or abandoned by their family members by acts of nature or human being and in A Mercy Morrison mainly tells the psychological pilgrimage of Florens from childhood to adulthood. Quite different from Pecola's growing process, Florens experiences puzzlement, helplessness as well as the maturing journey of her emotion and independent consciousness through her introspection. Through Florens's growing process, we can foresee the bright future of black girls'courage of changing their own destiny.Initiation is an old and everlasting literary theme as well as an inevitable stage in human's life journey, which implies a deep and universal cultural connotation. Bildungsroman, or initiation novel, as a literary genre, aims at exploring the protagonist's moral, psychological, and intellectual maturing experience. How to enter into the center of the dominant culture from the marginalized position and how to obtain a healthy and comprehensive initiation in the multi-cultural and multi-ethnic nation are the most essential issues that Morrison focuses on. Therefore the extensive exploration of the Afro girls'initiation is a recurrent theme among her works. The creation course from the birth of The Bluest Eye to the publication of A Mercy, and the black girls'progressive growth from loss to awakening and as well as the horizon of humanistic concern from one race to multi-race adequately present the"bildung"of Morrison's writing career.This thesis, in a tentative way, chooses Morrison's first and latest novel --- The Bluest Eye and A Mercy as examples to explore the little black girls'painstaking growing process in terms of Bildungsroman, or initiation novel, which aims at providing a new approach to Morrison's study. This thesis begins with an overview of Bildungsroman so as to lay a theoretic foundation on the analysis of The Bluest Eye and A Mercy. Then presents two kinds of initiation: a tentative initiation on Pecola and a decisive initiation on Florens,and concentrates on a detailed comparative analysis of the two different growing results from the perspective of guides and epiphanies in initiation. Finally draws a conclusion that the guidance from family and community members will produce a far-reaching effect on the protagonists'developing process. Besides, self-redemption is a decisive factor in the building of children's personality. Only when the children, especially the ethnic female children form a right self-consciousness and possess a spiritual self-acceptance via introspection can they acquire a healthy and holistic growth in the multicultural nation.