Black Manhood Identity Construction In Beloved

Tony Morrison, an outstanding African American literary giant and the first blackwoman writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature, is considered to be the most talentedand influential woman writer of her race in the contemporary literary world. Her works,especially novels, have deeper and more profound implications than what is usuallyunderstood. With a strong sense of racial mission, Tony Morrison devotes herself toexploring the ways for black people’s search for freedom and their identity construction.All her ten novels can be interpreted to be examples of this kind, of which Beloved isundoubtedly the most classical one.In the history, African Americans living in a culture dominated by WASP werealways obsessed with the issue of identity. Both in the period of slavery and after theybecame free, African Americans were debased by the whites all the time. They wereregarded as either the lowest type of human beings or inferior race. Their identities werealways associated with derogatory words and were in a constant crisis. Because of this,black men’s image has always been a major concern of black literature. Such literaryworks are of great importance for black men to achieve their subjectivity and getthrough their identity crisis. They are also very enlightening for the oppressed andsilenced black males in the bottom society to obtain a sense of dignity as real men.From the perspective of deconstruction, Beloved can be regarded as a representativeliterary work which describes African Americans’ conscious construction of identity inthe process of their integration into a white-dominated American society. In this novel,Toni Morrison attempts to construct black manhood identity from three aspects, that is,their relationships with self, with others and with the physical world. First, withmeticulous and felicitous depictions of Paul D’s psychological changes in hisunderstanding of the real meaning of being a real man, Tony Morrison reveals the blackmale’s inner struggle and awakened consciousness for self-identity and constructs theblack manhood identity from the aspect of the relationship between a black man andhimself. Second, by portraying Paul D’s changes in his attitudes towards sex, Morrisonexplores the black male’s physical and spiritual devastation brought by racialdiscrimination and oppression, and constructs the black manhood identity from the aspect of the relationship between the black man and others. Third, Morrison provides adetailed description of the male protagonist’s changing “homes” and his return to Setheas a symbol of black people’s miserable life and illustration of their difficulty inbuilding families, and constructs the black manhood identity from the aspect of therelationship between the black man and the physical world. Besides, Morrison employssymbolism to indicate that there is only way for the black males to achieve a sense ofbelonging, that is, by facing the past and understanding the unspeakable history ofslavery.