Alienation And Regression

Toni Morrison(1931-), as the first African-American woman who was awardedthe Nobel Price in Literature, has written nine fictions so far. Her third novel Song ofSolomon(1977), which depicts the life of the protagonist Milkman’s coming-of-ageand his searching for his cultural identity and his family genealogy, can be widelyregarded as one of her representative works.Since the publication of Song of Solomon, it has attracted both readers’ andcritics’ attention. The scholars and critics from home and abroad have analyzed itfrom different points of view, such as naming, themes, African-American literaturecriticism, feminist criticism, archetypal criticism, magical realism, cultural criticism,post-colonial study and so on. But there has been no one specially using EthicalLiterary Criticism to study Song of Solomon so far, so in this thesis, Ethical LiteraryCriticism is used to analyze this fiction, which will provide the study of Song ofSolomon with a new perspective.This thesis is composed of five chapters. The first chapter is mainly about theintroduction of Toni Morrison and her fiction Song of Solomon, literature reviews,Ethical Literary Criticism and its application to Song of Solomon. The second chapterconcentrates on family environmental ethics and points out that every family ethicalfactor is interrelated with Milkman’s early ethical tragedy and his final ethicalsublimation by analyzing the marital relationship between Macon Dead and RuthFoster, the father-son relationship between Macon Dead and Milkman Dead and thekinship relationship between Pilate and Macon Dead’s Family respectively. The thirdchapter focuses on the human-society ethical relationship by analyzing Milkman’stransformation of social value orientations from the westerners’ values to the niggers’values, social injustice and disorder and even miserable women in patriarchal societyand concludes that Milkman’s final regression to his traditional black ethical identityis because of the help and influence of Pilate and other authentic black people. Thefourth chapter discusses the oversoul phenomenon and the African mythology ofdivine flying person respectively to point out that Song of Solomon is penetrated withAfrican religious ethics which evoke Milkman’s sense of national identity and helphim refind and regain his family roots, ancestral culture, religious beliefs and Africanethical identity and achieve his flight to become an authentic flying person. Then the conclusion points out that Song of Solomon is also an ethical novel and it is theseethical factors that push the protagonist Milkman from alienation to regression to hisAfrican and cultural ethical identity. Moreover, this thesis can not only bring the freshnourishment to our literary world and endow new connotations to the research onSong of Solomon, but it can also figure out a bright and right direction for all theyoung generations and encourage them to keep their own ethical identity.