Deformed Motherhood In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Sula And Song Of Solomon

Toni Morrison is the first African American Nobel Prize winner in literature. One of the crucial elements in her works is the "fantastic earthy realism," which blends with myths, to show a vivid picture of the lives of the black people, and particularly, to exhibit the motif of motherhood. She focuses her powerful stories on African American women's interior lives, particularly on what they are thinking and feeling in a given set of circumstances and also views the world from their special perspective. Motherhood is the best expression to present African American women's lives. In her novels Morrison depicts motherhood as a complex state that is influenced greatly by powerful physical, psychological, racial, patriarchal and cultural forces and meanwhile her motherhood is paradoxical: on the one hand, it is fearful and destructive; on the other hand, it is passionate and strong. Although Morrison's depiction of motherhood is against the traditional black "Great Mothers," the Goddess of human being, it is more real; although these mothers are not perfect, they are still to be sympathized.The Bluest Eye, Sula and Song of Solomon are Morrison's first three novels. The first and the second focus on the 1940's through 1960's and the third focuses on the 1960's. With these three novels Morrison seems to delineate an outline of modern black history as well as a vivid picture of black women's lives. Pauline, Eva and Ruth are representatives of contemporary African American mothers, who fail to retain their cultural heritage and love their children better, and Pecola, Sula and Milkman are the contemporary African American children, who fail to fight a powerful battle against patriarchy and racism or understand mothers' history in order to absorb the source of empowerment. Their mother-children problems centre on how to maintain an African American cultural heritage in spite of all the deprivations and pain. Through the analysis of the deformed motherhood, this thesis attempts to search for the source of this kind of morbidity and explain the importance of mothers' roles played on their children and the reasons why African American children need culture-bearing maternal love and why African American women are culture bearers.