Deconstruct The Center: A Franco-Feminist Approach To The Gender Politics In Toni Morrison's Love

The 1993 Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison is a writer described by the Nobel Prize committee as one "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality". In her novels, Morrison has always sought to depict the complexities and varieties of African American experiences. Rejecting the usual simplistic thought that treat the marginalized as a relegated other, Morrison has the imperatives of difference—notably that of race and gender—as her central concerns. In destabilizing the established notions of power and powerlessness and establishing a deference to the other, Morrison gives voice to a voiceless people and endows her artistic creations with a political import.With the sharpening of her deconstructive insight, Morrison more and more recognizes the black community as a milieu for differences and turns to speak the unspeakable black complicity in the suffering within the black community. The eighth novel Love just focuses on the intraracial gender issues. And as before, Morrison discloses the forces of tyranny and explores the voices of the victimized. Therefore this thesis will apply the theoretical tools of deconstruction and feminism, especially the Franco-feminism, which most pointedly seeks to investigate the feminine voice, to the study of the novel's gender politics.As Morrison always refuses an either/or logic, here again, in delineating the female characters'rebellion against the patriarchal laws and assertion of their own agency, Morrison doesn't end merely with a reversal of the male-centered binarism. Having love as the novel's title, from the beginning Morrison has aimed to use this common human emotion as a connection between maleness and femaleness to combat disunities caused by gender hegemonies. Such an approach gives Morrison's deconstructive project a humanitarian brilliancy.