On Carnival Characterization And Spirits In Sula

Toni Morrison is one of the most preeminent contemporary novelists. She won the Nobel Prize in 1993 and became the first black woman writer to have this honor. Characterized by visionary force and poetic import, her works occupy an essential part of American African literature. With extraordinary consideration for black people, especially black women, Morrison repeatedly stresses the theme of self-identification of black females by means of presenting the loss of both their spiritual and material home during her creation process.Sula, as a landmark of Morrion's literary career, is a forceful example of black female's self-identification theme. Set in a fictional black community Bottom, Sula aims at exploring the long, painful and hard journey of black women's pursuit of self, while revealing their distorted mental world and desperate struggle for life under double discriminations from both the white and the black males. Since the publication in 1973, many literary theoretical approaches, including psychoanalysis, black feminism, narratology and culture study, have been used to interpret Sula.However, the consistency between Morrison's idea of pluralism and Bahktin's world-wide carnival sense still leaves quite a room for further and new understandings of Sula. Therefore, this thesis will conduct a close analysis of carnival features and spirits in Sula by means of carnival theory. With interpretation of black females'characterization and their grotesque behaviors on the carnival square, it is not hard to find that Sula, as a novel full of carnival elements, exactly reveals the complexity, ambivalence and openness emphasized by Morrison.At the same time, this thesis argues that through descriptions of carnival figures and paired images, Sula has well presented the black women's pursuit of self-identification theme. Althouth being labeled the same neither white nor male identities, Eva, Sula and Nel choose different attitudes towards self-identification: conventionality, rebellion and awakening. Even though the three women's tragedy is doomed, the open denouement shows the spirit of renewal celebrated by carnival, which signals that there is still a long way for black women to trudge in order to obtain spiritual liberation.