Subversion And Development

As the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature,Toni Morrison is a novelist for ages and a major voice in African American writing. She is keen on writing the novels concerning the black lives and black history and seems to have shown a special insight into the predicament of the African American women in American history.Toni Morrison has published eight novels since 1970, which have established her position in American literary history as a first-rate novelist. In 1987, Morrison published her fifth novel named Beloved, which was set after the end of the civil war, during the period of the so-called reconstruction. Beloved, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1988 is Toni Morrison's masterpiece inspired by the real story of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who attempted to kill her children rather than to have them returned to slavery.Many scholars pay a lot of attention to the themes, the images and the magical realistic colors of the novel. However, they seldom pay attention to the Gothic elements of the novel. This thesis focuses on the Gothic elements in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, it is true that Toni Morrison follows the Gothic traditions, but she, in her unique way, subverts and develops the Gothic conventions by which she deconstructs the history dominated by the white voices and reconstructs it with the black voices. Through the study on the subversion and the development of the Gothic elements in Beloved, this thesis shows a new point of view to understand Toni Morrison's work.The present thesis includes three chapters plus introduction and conclusion. The introduction part generally demonstrates Toni Morrison and her novel Beloved; and it also introduces the argument of this thesis: Toni Morrison does not completely follow the traditional Gothic conventions but creatively combines them with the historical reality of the African American people. Chapter one is a brief introduction of the conventions of setting, characterization, plot and narration in 18th-century Gothic novels. Chapter two analyzes the Gothic elements of Toni Morrison's Beloved in detail and studies how Toni Morrison subverts and develops the characteristics of the traditional Gothic novels. It is subdivided into four parts: the subversion and development of setting, characterization, plot and narrative techniques. Firstly, Toni Morrison breaks the imaginativeness of the traditional Gothic novels by setting Beloved in the reality of African American history and by arranging the plot with the historical fact. Secondly, she subverts the paradigm of the characterization in the traditional Gothic novels by creating the characters both as victim and victimizer and by depicting the vulnerable male and children images. Thirdly, she softens the grotesqueness and terror by arranging the infanticide event to be narrated by the white and by using a kind of graceful and poetic language and beautiful images. Last, Toni Morrison breaks the Gothic narrative conventions by combining African American narrative conventions and the western literary conventions. Chapter three mainly introduces the functions of the author's subversion and development of the traditional Gothic elements in her novel. The subversion and the development of the traditional Gothic elements help the author rediscover the history, deepen the themes and criticize the slavery system. The last part draws a conclusion on the basis of Morrison's creative use of the traditional Gothic elements in her novel.