Shattering The Double Fetters, Reconstructing Wonderful Life-A Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation Of Beloved

Toni Morrison is a preeminent black female writer in American literary circles and she is the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature. Her extraordinary feature consists in her works are characterized by visionary force and poetic import, giving life an essential aspect of American reality. Her representative works include The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon and Beloved. Among them, Beloved is considered as her best novel, and it has won the literary prizes such as American Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.Beloved reveals the darkness of slavery and its torture towards women. The inspiration of Beloved comes from a real story. After Morrison’s imagination and organization, it has become a broadly appealing production. Toni Morrison is a black woman from the minority groups, so she adds into her novel the double life experience of females and the colonized or marginalized minority groups. Although there are many scholars have analyzed Beloved from different perspectives, the analyzing theses from the angle of postcolonial feminism are relatively small in number.Therefore, this thesis attempts to take postcolonial feminism as entry point, and discourse, identity, subject as key points to analyze colonial discourse, criticize cultural hegemony, and explore a way for decolonization. It is good for stimulating literary academic circles’ thinking about marginalized and disadvantaged groups and sincerely paying attention to females’living condition which is under the interaction of race, class, and gender. This thesis considers that postcolonial feminism literary criticism is worthy of being paid attention to. It overcomes the omissions and limitations of just postcolonialism or feminism literary criticism. Both of them are involved with the issues of marginalization and otherness. It will help academic circles to completely and profoundly demonstrate the third world and minority women’s decolonization process of fighting against gender discrimination, racism, and cultural imperialism. This is exactly the social significance of Beloved.