Magic-realistic Technique In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Toni Morrison is a famous contemporary American writer. In 1993, she won the Nobel Prize, for her description "in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import", which gives life to an essential aspect of American reality. Among all the eight wonderful novels she has written, Beloved is the most famous one. Critics evaluate this "magic and splendid" book as "a milestone in black literary history". The author of the present thesis believes that her employment of magic realism in Beloved plays an extremely important role in conveying the themes and producing the shocking effects. It is also one of the most attractive points deserving a detailed research in the artistic features of this novel, as well as an unexplored research field till now. This distinctive feature really deserves enough attention within literature and is worth researching. Thus, this thesis studies the magic realism in Beloved.Magic realism, rooted in Latin America, is distinctive by three marks: first, it juxtaposes magic and realistic elements, causing impressive magic and aesthetic effects in the readers' minds by blending the boundary between the fancy and the reality, the past and the present, dream and reality. Second, it abundantly employs mythological archetypes, including western myths and African folklores, which endow the words with fabulous meaning. Third, it uses the fantastic images in nature and characters to show magic reality, for example, the tree image on Sethe's back, the unpredictable water image, etc. All these three artistic features contributing to the revelation of the theme of the novel combine closely from three levels. And this thesis is designed to study this fantastic writing skill. The whole thesis can be divided into three parts. In the first part, the author of the present thesis explores the juxtaposition of magic and realistic elements within the novel, and a "myth world" unfolds. The second part studies the mythological archetypes employed in this novel. The last part deals with the fabulous images that speed up the uncovering of reality under mysterious veil.All in all, Toni Morrison successfully mixes magic realism into the creation of the novel—Beloved. Obviously it can be summarized that the themes are constructed on the basis of magic realism, which proves the essential position of magic realism in the creation of Beloved. However, it is inappropriate to say that this magic realistic perspective can exhaust all the charms of this labyrinthine novel. Through the distinctive magical eyes, Toni Morrison warns that only if the black slaves took warning from the history and stood upon their own tradition and culture can they achieve real, totally physical and psychological freedom.