Rebirth And Hopes

Being one of the most famous novelists in the contemporary American literary world, Toni Morrison is the first African American woman writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Her great achievements in fiction and literary criticism have exerted vibrating influences on the American and even the whole literary world. Her novels have been widely appreciated and highly evaluated for both their profound themes and unique artistic excellence. A variety of critical approaches are adopted to analyze and interpret her fictions as well as her writing facilitiess and her capacities as a great writer.All works composed by Toni Morrison are dedicated to explore and depict the African Americans' history, destiny and spiritual world. Black women and their maternal love is the major concern and the most important theme in Morrison's fictions. As many critics and readers have noted, the loss and distortion of maternal love plays across time in all her eight novels. According to Morrison's black feminist thought, the culture-bearing maternal love that at the core of her ideal of black motherhood is an ancient property and the tar of the African Americans. It is the key element that guarantees the establishment of African Americans' complete and sound subjectivity and ensures the reconstruction of their ethnic consciousness. The African American descendants' quest of for maternal love is not only a way to understand their mothers' violent and bloody maternal love, but also a search of self-identity and the way to carry on the African American cultural heritage.This thesis intends to concentrate on Morison's fifth novel Beloved, the one that is regarded as a milestone in American literary history. In Beloved, Morrison tries to "rememory" the ex-slave mothers' painful past to cure African American people's inner trauma with the black maternal love. Therefore, based on a careful reading of the text and mainly from a perspective of black feminism, this thesis endeavors to probe into the loss and distortion of black maternal love under oppressions of slavery. It tentatively explores how and why the black maternal love gets deformed and what empowerments it has generated on the characters' life, the community and even the whole race.This thesis consists of five parts, among which the first and the last parts are introduction and conclusion; the rest (chapter two to chapter four) is the body of the thesis. The introduction part offers a brief account of the author Tony Morrison, Beloved and its former critical comments as well as the necessity and significance of this study. Chapter two deals with Morrison's feminist thought on maternal love and the black mothers' "unspeakable" past in Beloved. Chapter three and chapter four focus on the empowerments of black maternal love. Chapter three investigates the empowerments of Baby Suggs' extended maternal love towards the community. Chapter four carefully examines the empowerments of maternal love and mothers' stories towards Denver in her quest for self-identity. Along with the further understanding of her mother's past stories, the mother and daughter relationships between Sethe and Denver change completely. It is the cultural-bearing maternal love that helps Denver construct her independent identity as a representative of the black women of a new generation. The thesis in the end concludes that it is the black maternal love that empowers the African Americans to survive against such racial prejudice and the patriarchal white culture, that nurture the new generation to achieve not only a strong authentic selfhood but also an ethnic cultural consciousness.In a word, Beloved is an anthem composed by Morrison for the slave mothers and their great maternal love. In this paper, the significance and distinctiveness are in, by analyzing this outstanding feminist work from the perspective of black feminism, exploring a nation's rebirth and hopes brought by the black women who have undergone many plights of racial oppressions and gender discriminations. And in a hope of inspiring all the once or still marginalized people, this thesis is looking forward to providing something constructive on our way to build a harmonious and equitable human society.