The Quest For A Black Female Identity

Since the very start of human civilization, women are considered to be morally weak, sexually bestial and ideologically inferior. For centuries, women are questioning who they are either in real life or in the fictional world. The identity theme has nearly turned to be a tradition in women's literature. In Their Eyes Were Watching God and Sula, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison try to ask the same question of who they are as the black female in the white-dominated patriarchal culture through the portrayal of the heroines Janie, Sula and Nel. This paper, in a tentative way, aims to explore the three heroines'quest journey in these two works from the psychological dimension (the maternal bond),the social dimension(the black community), and the moral dimension( conflicts between self and other, autonomy and caring) to present how the personal and social relationships influence or channel the female self-definition.