Authority Of Narrative Voice--A Study Of Feminist Narrative Voice In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Toni Morrison(1931- ) is one of the most celebrated contemporary novelists in America.She was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993,and she is also the first African American woman to win this honor. Her works,due to her authentic and vivid description of African American experiences and poetic and powerful diction,have exerted great impact on American and world literature.Beloved published in 1987 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction(in 1988).It has kept winning the critical acclaim and scholarly attention since then.Critics have studied it from different perspectives and have come out with a variety of enlightening understandings.The special narrative techniques of the novel have attracted people's strong attention,yet few have done thorough studies upon it through the feminist narratology.Feminist narratology is an interdisciplinary literary theory which has come into being since the 1980s.It unites the analyses of forms with the study of ideology,and therefore overcomes the respective weakness of feminist literary criticism and structural narratology.In literary criticism,feminist narratology probes into writings from different perspectives and accumulates plenty of analytical experience.The initiator of feminist narratology,Susan Sniader lanser, considers narrative forms as the ground and tool for political struggles, and focuses on "voice" of women's narration.Here,"voice" is a kind of narrative voice which refers to the expressed opinions and viewpoints which are women-centered according to the definition of feminist narratology.It also refers to the narrative discourse.Narrative works are texts of forms.However,the narrator is a social being,and therefore what kind of narrative voice or narrative discourse is employed has much to do with the narrative authority and women's ability to "say".Combined with classical narratology,this thesis is an attempt to probe into the narrative voice of Beloved from the perspective of feminist narratology.It starts from the literature review and then makes a brief introduction to the voice,authority and feminist narratology in Introduction part.The next three chapters focus on the authority of authorial voice,communal voice and variable narrative voices to discuss how Toni Morrison achieves the authority of feminine narration by the adoption of different narrative voices.Through detailed analysis of narrative voices in Beloved,the thesis comes to a conclusion that Beloved is a novel of delicate narrative strategies which deepen the theme.This research deepens and enriches the study of feminist narratology.It also widens the study of Toni Morrison,and in a broader sense,to the study of African American literature.The author discusses the authority of feminine narration by mingling both the voice of social identity and narrative voice.This research aims to change its single tendency to study narratology itself and endows the text study with an ideology analysis. Through the analysis of feminist narrative voice in Beloved,the author of this thesis hopes to have a better and deeper study of feminine texts in the future.