An Archetypal Interpretation Of Toni Morrison’s Novels

As a master of black literature, Toni Morrison portrays Afro-American people’s suffering in slavery, crisis of identity and their contradictory spiritual world with her abundant imagination and poetic styles of expression. Her works display outstanding artistic techniques. For instance, Morrison’s creative adoption and displacement of ancient myths and biblical stories are highly acclaimed by numerous readers both at home and abroad.Through the adoption of archetypal criticism, this thesis mainly analyzes the archetypal characters, imagery and motifs in Morrison’s three well-known novels Sula, Song of Solomon and Beloved. This thesis first interprets the archetypal characters, such as scapegoat, Jesus, Odysseus and Medea. By adopting these archetypal characters, Morrison displays some typical tragic figures of the black people and their suffering during the quest for identity and freedom. In Frye’s view, imagery mainly consists of the apocalyptic imagery and the demonic imagery. But the meanings of the imagery are different according to the specific contexts. This thesis also discusses the dominating archetypal imagery in Morrison’s novels, laying emphasis on the skillful patterns of naming and the imagery of fire, water and trees. Name is important for black people because it stands for black people’s unique cultural root. Through the adoption and displacement of these archetypes, Morrison reveals the internal conflict in black community and their spiritual trauma caused by the racial oppression.By.the creative adoption of these ancient myths, Morrison attempts to reconstruct the traditional Afro-American history and culture, arouse the collective unconscious of the black people and warn them not to alienate their traditional cultural root. According to Morrison, only by holding fast to their own culture and getting united, can they realize self -salvation and embrace the real freedom.