Blackness Lost And Preserved

Toni Morrison, one of the most shining stars in the black American literary circle, is the only black female winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Her works are deeply rooted in the black history, black lore and the reality of the blacks. As a black female writer, her works are contextualized with three terms—black, female and American. Through her writing, she shows great concern about the lives, experiences and the spiritual world of the blacks, especially that of the black women. Meanwhile, her works is permeated with rich black cultural traditions, such as the black music—blues, the sense of the black community, the ancestors, and the black language as well as the myths and rituals. Toni Morrison's literary excellence lies in her creative combination of the themes of the works and the artistry. Her concerns about the life and experience of the black people, her social consciousness and her special craftsmanship have shaped her writing into the typical black literature.According to Morrison, the survival of the black ethnic group can not be guaranteed only through its possession of political rights and economic independence, but also through the retaining of their black traditional culture. Thus this point provides us readers with a standpoint for either analyzing or comprehending her novels. Based on this point, this thesis, from the perspective of the black cultural tradition, tries to probe into the relationship of the black culture and the black people's self-identity. Through a detailed analysis of the two contrasting groups of characters and their corresponding behaviors in the white culture dominated society as well as their ensuing fate and consequence, the thesis is meant to show that those who have adhered to their cultural tradition could preserve their subjectivity and wholeness, so they could live through the sufferings in the white society by resisting the evil influences of the white culture;however, those who have consciously or unconsciously abandoned their cultural heritage and cut off the ties with the black family and community will be doomed to get lost in the white society and caged in the pain of seeking themselves.This thesis is composed of four parts. The first part presents a brief introduction to Toni Morrison as a black female writer and the synopsis of her first book The Bluest Eye. Part Two and Part Three, on the basis of the specific aspects of the black tradition, i.e. theblues, the sense of the black community, the ancestor and the taste for art and so on, probe into a series of major characters in the novel by analyzing their disparate behaviors and representations resulted from their attitude toward the traditional culture for the purpose of forming a sharp contrast between them. The conclusion functions on the one hand as an emphasis in digging out Toni Morrison's intention in connecting the black cultural tradition with the loss or preservation of blackness, on the other hand, it also points out the author's limitations in comprehending and analyzing the novel, leaving much to be studied further in the future.