Black Women’s Body And Construction Of Self In Morrison’s Novels

The present dissertation is a comprehensive study of the black women’s body in Toni Morrison’s novels. Through a systematic expatiation of nine major novels of Morrison, it is pointed out that Morrison’s presentation of black women undergoes three major stages, in each of which she depicts their body from different dimensions of race, space and discourse respectively. From this, the self-construction of Morrison’s black female characters is explored so as to indicate that body, as a crucial means of humankind’s perceptual existence that helps form their primordial link to the secular world, plays an inalienable role in black women’s construction of self.Toni Morrison (1931-) first appeared on the literary arena in the1960s and won the Nobel Prize in literature in1993. As a black woman writer, she is endowed with acute observation of the black’s life in America. In her novels that portray grandiose pictures of black’s survival, there is a multitude of black women with diversified connotations set over a wide span of time and locations.Regarding the bodily features of the black women, Morrison’s novels can be roughly divided into three stages. During the first stage from1970to1980covering the novels of The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1974) and Song of Solomon (1977), Morrison, still a novice and departing from the angle of black women, was more concerned about their static racial features. The second stage spans the years between1980and1992, in which Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992) were created. Despite her still profound concern for racism in Beloved, Morrison has risen above the denunciation of slavery and static limitations of black women’s physical features, revealed deep meanings of their wound body and mind in the shuffling time and highlighted the dynamic relationships between the spatiality of body and construction of women’s subject. Within the ten years between1998and2008, Morrison produced three novels of Paradise (1997), Love (2005) and A Mercy (2008). Different from the previous two stages of writings, there are no protagonists in the strict sense, but the collective portraits of black women and men living in communities. At this stage, Morrison, much less focused on the racial features of black women, relayed her focus on the spatial dimension of bodies in the second stage and developed it into the dialogic meanings of bodies among female bodies, between opposite sexes, or between the black and white that span distant times and use space as the medium, which exhibits her profound concern for the black community and the humankind as a whole.However, the traditional criticism on black women’s self-construction usually puts premium on racism, feminism, Morrison’s memory and reconstruction of the black history, the comparative study between Morrison and other classical British and American white writers, or the connection and symbiosis between the black and white and their cultures. It attaches considerable attention to the two layers of "women" and "blackness", yet lacks requisite concern about the basic features of "humans". At home, researches on Morrison from the perspective of body study have not been yielding many results, except for a few papers on the handicapped body and insufficiency of black culture or several scholars’books. Equally scarce is a systematic research on black women’s body, especially with its link to the self-construction of black women. Therefore studies on the body of Morrison’s black female characters would be academically justifiable and worthwhile.The first chapter of the dissertation starts from the philosophical trace of "self", illustrating that traditional philosophy researches on existence from the perspective of existents and hence leads to the ignorance of man’s existence. Under this circumstance, Heidegger’s Dasein, with its basic construction of "living in the world" restores man’s real existence. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception offers corporeal existence the following existentialist expatiation:body is used to perceive the world and through the present existence of body emerges the meaning of the world; body is the place where phenomena are expressed and is the reality of the expression of meaning per se. To black women, body is their general way of owning the world, and to the perceived world, body is its general tool of comprehension. It is body that makes black women "perceive" the world,"comprehend" the world and "work" on the world.The racial dimension of Chapter Two mainly adopts important viewpoints in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Foucaultian theories. It expounds how black women’s construction of self goes through the process from self-deprecation to self-reflection from the tragedy of Pecola’s misconception of body in Bluest to Sula’s contemptuous fight against men with her body in Sula, till naval-lacking Pilate’s salvation of the degenerated male world represented by Milkman in Solomon. Nevertheless, as such construction of women’s subject is a static one repressed by the level of entity, an overall construction of their self needs to discard taking black women for objects and return to the living world in which the black women’s bodies exist.Chapter Three deals with the spatial dimension of black women’s body. In addition to Merleau-Ponty’s theory, Lefebvre’s The Production of Space is referred to in the dissertation to explore black women’s body in their living world and highlight its dynamic spatial meanings. In the specific texts, from Jadine’s "transgressed" body in Tar to Beloved’s "intervening" body in Beloved, and to the "conflictory" body of Violet and Dorcas in Jazz, black women’s body is set in an active position in its relationships between the world and undergoes the dynamic construction of "phenomenal" self in the three consecutive spaces of material, spirit and society.In Chapter Four, which centers on the discursive dimension of black women’s body, the dissertation points out that body is a tacit expression of thoughts and a beneficial complement to langue and highlights the dialogic and communicative meanings of the communal bodies of black women with reference to Merleau-Ponty’s theory of "The Body as Expression, and Speech". As has been exhibited in Morrison’s last three novels, from "excluded" body to "assimilated" body in Paradise, from "alienated" body to "harmonized" body in Love, and from "liberated" body to the body that is symbolically "enslaved" anew in human history in Mercy, the construction of reciprocal self is achieved through the retrieved human history, which instills more profound compassion and care for the destiny of the entire humankind at an even higher level.Moreover, the dissertation further points out in each section of Chapters Two, Three and Four:in the early, middle and late stages of Morrison’s novels, several women’s deaths are highlighted. Specifically, Pilate’s death in the first stage, Beloved’s ultimate real death in the second stage, and the death of Consolata in the third stage. Their deaths, on the one hand embody the tactical craftsmanship of Morrison, on the other, implicates heavy tragic sense and profound existential meaning in the sacrifice of black women’s self-construction.Chapter Five induces that the birth and development of black women’s subject is not in a unitary linear process, but in a spiral process which is forward and permanent. It is correlative with the self-identity of black women, which first of all has body as the starting point, as body not only constitutes the ontological precondition of the existence of subject, but also is the direct external symbol and expression of subject. In the interactions with the outside world, subject always takes body for the preliminary representation of its existence. The active effect and even death embodied in black women’s body exhibit the permanent goals of feminism, i.e., humankind’s perennial pursuit of striving into liberation and freedom.The conclusion of the dissertation sums up that after the three-stage construction of "ontic self","phenomenal self" and "reciprocal self", the black women in Morrison’s novels accomplish their construction of self, which takes women’s difference for its basic content, women’s transcendence for its feature, and women’s liberty for its goal. Moreover, the ultimate liberation of black women’s body and mind can only be founded on their sound communication-based relationships with men. To this, the referential value of Chinese Confucianism and Taoism is also briefed in order to help the humankind successfully stride over the threshold of history into a better future.