Reconstruction Of Racial,Gender And National Identities

As representatives of African American female writers,Toni Morrison and Alice Walker are mainly concerned about the living condition of African American females in their works,revealing their thinking on black women's living condition.They pay attention to body trauma of black women and the significance of body in reconstructing identity.Their representative works Beloved and The Color Purple both present black women's body trauma and identity dilemma.Beloved and The Color Purple,as works of wining Pulitzer Prize,have attracted a lot of critics' attention since their publication.Black women's living condition has always been the focus of critics.But there are few interpretations on these two novels analyzing black women's body trauma and multi-identity reconstruction by inquiring into African American women's body writing.Through body writing,Toni Morrison and Alice Walker present respectively in Beloved and The Color Purple three themes of race,gender,and nation in the context of feminism.This thesis studies black woman's racial,gender,and national identity reconstruction,through the perspective of body writing to explore the common motivate of both writers and different focuses of writing black female characters' subjective identity reconstruction by analysis of black female characters in these two novels.Combining Toni Morrison and Alice Walker's personal experiences with their novel writing,this paper discusses Toni Morrison and Alice Walker's body writing intention centered on the recurrent theme of body in these two novels through an analysis of black women's living condition and identity reconstruction from the perspective of Helene Cixous' body writing and Alice Walker's womanism.In the analysis,African-American female characters' sufferings in Beloved and The Color Purple being the focus,the body trauma and body loss of African American females under patriarchal and racial discrimination are presented.In the process of healing trauma and looking for self-identity,African American females achieve the body redemption through maternal inheritance and transcendence as well as sisterly support.Maternal inheritance and transcendence is about African-American women's tracing the ancestors' roots and struggling away from the"suspended mother" image for self-awakening.Sisterly support is African-American women's getting support from females to achieve self-liberation.Body consciousness and liberation enable African American women to reconstruct their identities,including racial,gender,and national identities with the achievement of body remolding.Finally,it draws the conclusion that African American female writers take body as writing space to reveal the possibility of multi-identity reconstruction through corporeal perception and activities.