The Voice Of Silenced Black Women In Toni Morrison's Works

Black Americans represent a distinctive human group socially defined on the basis of both physical and cultural criteria. Historically, the physical criterion of skin color formed the basis of oppression and stigmatization; nowadays, such "physical criteria" are no longer used as a basis for discrimination. However, living for almost four centuries of slavery and social stigma, Black Americans have been deeply impressed with the feeling of being inferior in the mainstream culture of America. Thus, the emergence of black culture and that of black feminist critics is kind of the product of the experiences peculiar to slavery, oppression and the related concept of racism on one hand; on the other hand, it is also a reservation and extension of African legacy, by which the oppressed and silenced black people, especially the black women, are rewritten and given back voices. Black Women are considered as the bearers of traditional African culture; the silenced individual woman image represents the silenced black community to some extent.Toni Morrison, a prominent contemporary black woman writer, keenly senses the marginal position and dilemma of black people who are confronted with the impact of white culture. Therefore, how to preserve black people's culture which is in danger of assimilation by the white dominant culture and how to survive from that sense of marginality, and more importantly, how to invigorate the whole black people become the major subjects of her works.The purpose of the paper is to develop a theory of identity and to explore the usage of black conventions and mythical folk tales by Toni Morrison as metaphors for women's rediscovery of self-identity, and thus giving back voices to the silenced black women for centuries. One application of this theory has been explored in the novel Tar Baby in which Morrison addresses the predicament of the characters' perceived betrayals of their race and their sense of displacement in face of the dominant culture by way of rewriting the conventional black folktale. In both Beloved and Tar Baby, Toni Morrison...