| As the first black Nobel Prize writer, there is no doubt that Toni Morrison represents the highest achievements of black literature. As her fifth novel, Beloved explores the history of the black’s self-emancipation in the shadow of slavery and become Morrison’s most popular book. By depicting the suffering and rejoice of one single family, Morrison not only vividly reproduces the inhuman experience that the black slaves suffered from slavery, but also makes powerful commentary on the profound psychological destruction and historical legacy of slavery. The legacy is so severe that black slaves can’t obtain complete freedom even after getting rid of slavery for years.Beloved has drawn wide attention both at home and abroad since it was published. Academic literary critics have interpreted this novel from different perspectives: psychoanalysis, structuralism, feminism, western Marxism, narratology, and so on. In domestic research, few people apply mirror stage theory to the interpretation of Beloved. The mirror stage, which describes the formation of infant’s sense of ego, is Jacques Lacan’s important contribution to psychoanalysis. Morrison’s Beloved highlights the theme to reconstruct the lost self. Based on the mirror stage theory, this paper attempts to analyze what caused the main characters’trauma and their loss of selves and track their difficult journey of searching their selves.This paper is constituted of four parts. The first part begins with a brief introduction of Toni Morrison and her Beloved, Lacan and his mirror stage. The second part analyzes three characters’loss of their selves from two factors:the mother-daughter relationship and the persecution of siavery. The third part discusses main characters’hard, long journey of self-searching. The last part summarizes the achievement and deficiency of this paper. Applying Lacan’s mirror stage theory to analyze and study this work provides a new perspective for interpreting Beloved. |
