From Innocence To Self-Awareness, And To Resistance: A Critical Layering Of The Sexual Violence In Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Beloved And The Bluest Eye

In recent years, it is more than inappropriate to define Toni Morrison as "marginal", not because she has come to the center of the literary canon, but because through her multifaceted and untiring work, she has managed to move that center from a restricted, male-centered literary world to a multicultural mosaic one. In her examinations of the African Americans’inherited wounds and the haunting memories that were generated by the horrors and aftermath of slavery, her resistance to the mainstream constructions of gender and race, and her reinvention of a characteristic rape narratives are of specific importance to the development of current feminist retheorizing of black female sexuality. Despite the differences and dissonances among these fictions, they unite and engage with each other in their respective attempts to investigate the influence of slavery and racism on African-Americans who have been shackled to a status that was strikingly reminiscent of bondage, especially the bondage of sexual violence.In her three novels, A Mercy, Beloved and The Bluest Eye, Morrison explores the effects of the sexual violence on the black females in three different historical stages: pre-slavery, in the high time of slavery and post-slavery. Tracing the relations between blacks and whites to slavery, Morrison examines the sexual exploitation and discrimination that whites have perpetrated on blacks throughout American history on grounds of the re-enshrinement of racial supremacy. From the invention of black feminine body as an object of inferiority in A Mercy, to the further specification into Jezebel and Mammy in Beloved, and finally The Bluest Eye’s both internalization and resistance of white aesthetics of beauty among the black community, Morrison figures out black females’ever-developing self-awareness from innocence to resistance towards their plight.