From Opposition To Integration

In the20th century American literary world, Toni Morrison is a unique existence. For readers, she is not only a renowned African American female writer, the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in1993, but also a senior professor, critic and a senior editor. Her works, which are mostly involved with political themes such as race, gender and class, have become an indispensable part of American literature. Because of her "visionary force and poetic import","giving life to an essential aspect of American reality", American literature thus presents its extraordinary splendor.Just like Morrison, Lacan and Homi Bhabha are household names in today’s literary world, too. Lacan built up the logical starting point of his whole analysis system based on the theory of mirror stage, in which he mainly discussed the nature of self and the formation process of self-identity. Homi Bhabha, as an important member of the "Holy Trinity" of post-colonial discourse, with its theory of hybridity and its ideal of cosmopolitanism, sought rights for "minority" people around the world. While Morrison, an indomitable black woman who makes her living in the American mainstream society, can be regarded as one of the most typical representatives of "minority" group. Her works are mostly involved with the topics of self-pursuit or the lost identity. As for cultural communication and cultural integration, Morrison expressed her good wishes by using unique narrative structure as well as poetic language, thus echoing the core of Homi Bhabha’s post-colonialism. This thesis attempts to use Morrison’s fourth novel Tar Baby as the prototype, with the aid of Lacan and Homi Bhabha’s theories, and to analyze the two characters:Son and Jadine, including the formation process of their different cultural identities, the reasons for their identity dilemma and the ways out of the shackles of culture.This thesis is divided into three chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction mainly includes a brief introduction to Toni Morrison and her work Tar Baby, literature review and an overview of Lacan’s mirror stage theory and Homi Bhabha’s post-colonialism.The first chapter mainly discusses two extreme identity choices in Tar Baby, analyzing how Son and Jadine form their different self-identities on the basis of Lacan’s mirror stage theory."Mirror images" exert both correct guidance and negative misleading on the characters’ self-consciousness, which have resulted in the heroes’ distinctively different fates.The second chapter mainly explores the reasons why the protagonists are trapped in serious identity dilemma. With the aid of Homi Bhabha’s post-colonialism, this chapter tries to suggest that both colonialism of white culture and degradation of black nationalism are important causes for Afro-Americans’ hard survival in American modern society.The third chapter tries to figure out the possible course out of the shackles of culture in Tar Baby. Perhaps only when the two characters mirror each other, rely on each other to make up for the lack of self, and pursue the common ideal of cosmopolitanism can they really merge with each other, and thus finally adapt themselves to the modern life of American society.The conclusion highlights the main points explicated in the above chapters. Moreover, it emphasizes that African Americans need to harmonize the relationships between history and reality, tradition and modernity in order to achieve the aim of well combining the two selves together and catch up with the development of the times.