The Theme Of Double Consciousness In Toni Morrison's Jazz

Toni Morrison,who was awarded Nobel Prize for literature in 1993,is considered as one of the most outstanding novelists on the literary stage in the contemporary world. As an Afro-American female writer,Morrison mainly focuses her attention on the life of the Black and writes a series of novels.In her process of writing,Morrison attaches importance to African American's history.Undoubtedly,her works are deeply rooted in the history of Blacks and she devotes to describing the life of the ordinary black people and their inner spirit from her peculiar point of view.Besides,as a black female writer with strong black consciousness,Morrison's aim is not just recording the African American spiritual dilemma caused by cultural clash between white and black,but also helping the Blacks build their self-consciousness and get out of the trauma.Morrison is a productive writer with a lot of novels.From 1987 to 1998,Morrison published three novels,Beloved(1987),Jazz(1992) and Paradise(1998),which are regarded as a trilogy that presents one hundred years of African American history. During these years,Morrison's won lots of awards and she has quickly gained her reputation all around the world.Among all her novels,Jazz is her sixth one and the second of her trilogy.In this novel,Toni Morrison depicts a woman named Violet her affective crisis with her husband in the city and their memory about the past.By recalling the past,Morrison clearly describes the painful life of three generations of Violet's family through three important periods of African American history.It records history over half a century from the 1860s to the 1930s that involves American Slavery, Reconstruction and the Great Migration.As cheap labors shipped into America,African Americans' living in the United States underwent a bitter and painful experience and they struggled hard all through their life.In the period of Slavery,slaves totally forgot their status as they lost their freedom.Their life was a tragedy politically,economically and socially.After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery,African Americans entered another important historical period which was known as Reconstruction.Though African Americans were politically freed,their economic and social conditions didn't change at all.Furthermore,measures were taken to force Blacks to submit to the old social order.During this period,African Americans only gained some political advantages and they were still discriminated against by the society.To escape from the violent situation in the South,many African Americans moved to the North for social and economic freedom which is called the Great Migration.In the hope of finding a better life in the City,African Americans soon became disappointed because they found they felt lost and rootless in the City.In Jazz,Morrison centers on the power of memory and history.She finds that the Blacks face two-ness in their minds which deeply affect their self-realization in the life. Thus,this thesis intends to analyze the themes in Jazz under W.E.B.DuBois' "double consciousness" through African Americans' pain in the past.Morrison hopes to arouse Blacks' consciousness through the memory of history and helps to heal African Americans' spiritual wounds.In Jazz,Morrison not only concentrates on the trauma resulted in the painful history but also emphasizes that African Americans should have more communication in black community and love their ancestral African culture to build their real identity in the society.