Women In The Eden

Toni Morrison is one of the most outstanding Afro-American female novelists incontemporary America as well as on the world literary stage. She is the first African-American Nobel Prize winner for literature. In her creations, Morrison penetrates deeplyinto the hearts of the black, speaking to the present about the painful past of her ownpeople. As a female novelist, Toni Morrison focuses on the female’s experience, especiallythe black and the minority females. In A Mercy, her latest book as well as her ninth one,she does not exclusively concentrate on the black’s endless suffering and struggling, andinstead, she further reveals the brutal slavery imposed upon the entire nation in the earlycolonial era, when the white, the native and the black fall into co-victims, struggling withtheir splitting identities. The purpose of my study is to discuss the four main femalecharacters in the novel from the perspective of the combination of the myth-archetypalcriticism, postcolonial criticism and feminist criticism. By applying Frye’s myth-archetypal criticism to displace the four characters with quest hero who quest for theirHoly Grail, I will discuss the four female character’s different pursuit from the perspectiveof postcolonial and feminist criticism to reveal how the females Other to pursuit of identity.The thesis consists of five parts. The first part is the brief introduction of Toni Morrisonand her A Mercy. The second part is the relative theories which applied in the thesis. TheThird part discusses the four women characters by displacing them with the quest heroes inGreek myth. In the fourth part, by combining the postcolonial and feminist criticism,analysis of the women characters as the Other will be made. The last part is the conclusionto summarize the thesis and the significance of the study.