Lacanian Reading Of Subject Construction In Toni Morrison’s God Help The Child

Toni Morrison,a distinguished African-American woman writer,is generally regarded as one of the most influential African-American writers.Her works usually show great concerns about black people’s history,existing environment,and fate in different times.Her latest 11^thnovel God Help the Child（2015）has drew great attention once published.It is the first time that Morrison sets the novel background in modern society.In Morrison’s previous 10 novels,she takes a lot of words depicting black people’s historical,cultural,physical and mental trauma in past historical times.But this time,she turns her writing on the black women’s fate and subject construction in the contemporary American society.This novel tells about a little black girl called Bride who goes through a series of trauma such as racial discrimination,abandonment and abuse from parents and guilty of perjury in childhood.After that,with self-introspection,help and inspiration from both the white and black community,Bride finally gets rid of childhood trauma and accomplishes her subject construction as a real confident black woman.Mirror theory and the“three realms”（the Real Order,the Imaginary Order and the Symbolic Order）are the core components of Lacan’s theory and also important theoretical basis for subject construction.This paper mainly aims to analyze the different living conditions and subject construction of Bride in such three orders to reveal how the black female construct their identity under American contemporary living environment.This paper is divided into five chapters.Chapter one is the part of introduction,in which the author Toni Morrison and the novel God Help the Child are briefly introduced,domestic and foreign literature review is concisely presented,the theoretical framework is abstracted,and the significance and structure of this thesis is proposed.Chapter two mainly focuses on Bride’s living conditions and fragmental self-consciousness in pre-mirror stage,also called the Real Order.Faced with race discrimination from the white,color discrimination from the black community,abandonment of father and abuse from mother,Bride never feels care,warm and love from anyone,including her mother.The terrible childhood environment deprives Bride of a normal pre-mirror stage,which casts a pall over the next mirror stage.Chapter three centralizes on Bride’s exploration in the mirror stage,also the Imaginary Order.At this stage,Bride begins to challenge her mother’s rules and has her own ideas.Due to the emptiness of self,the subject needs the other/Other to constantly confirm the existence of himself through self-alienation and imaginary images in the mirror of others.Under the influence of the mirror images of the other/Other,Bride constructs an imaginary self.To demonstrate herself a brave and proud daughter image,she perjures in a court case,leading to an innocent white teacher’s 25-year-sentence as child molester.Later,she hasn’t taken her mother’s advice to further her study,instead,she leaves home early and goes to work after high school.She wants to prove she is not that little coward black girl in childhood in the eyes of mother any more but a tough girl.What’s more,in the trend of black beauty fashion,Bride takes advantage of her perfect black body to get a seemingly shining manager position in one cosmetic company and become the black beauty queen chased by shallow fleshy men in fashion circles.She is indulging herself in the black beauty image created by American overly consuming culture.And Brooklyn,the best friend she believes,turns out to be a hypocritical friend who takes advantage of Bride to get what she wants in job.The perfect image of girlfriend she believes herself in love relationship breaks up with the departure of her boyfriend Booker.Chapter four mainly explores Bride’s final accomplishment of subject construction in the post-mirror stage,also the Symbolic Order.At this stage,the subject begins to admit and register himself into the real world under the authority of the Name of Father.With self-retrospection,Bride confesses her guilty to the victim Sofia,which relieves her everlasting guilty and shame in her inner heart.With Booker’s departure,Bride’s adult woman feature begins to regress,which is the inner reflection of the disintegration of Bride’s previous illusionary subject construction.It means the self-rebuilding of her subject construction in a better way.During the journey to seek for Booker,Bride is saved by a white couple and a white girl Rain in a car accident.With inspiration from the white couple,Bride gets rid of discrimination about different races,knowing every kind of complexion is not a sin but a gift from God.Rain,a white girl who also suffers great mental trauma from mother in childhood,gives Bride an image of another self.Their trauma is finally healed through mutual narration.At last,with enlightenment from spiritual mother,an old black lady Queen who gives Bride care and love just like mother,she finally gets rid of trauma from the absence of maternal love in childhood.Queen,as the spiritual mother,inspires Bride to realize the radical reason of her childhood trauma is self-loathing and the loss of the inheritance of black culture because of the white aesthetics imposed on the black.At last,with Bride’s pregnancy,she turns back to the continuation of motherhood and new life,a real black woman is finally constructed.Chapter five is the conclusion part which summarizes Bride’s subject construction in such three periods.Morrison’s new thoughts about black women’s self-construction in the contemporary American society will also be fully demonstrated.