Magic Realism In Toni Morrison's Beloved

In 1987, the publication of Beloved shocked the American literary circles. Critics evaluated the novel highly. They regarded the "magic and splendid" work as "a triumph" ,"a milestone in black literary history ". Someone even declared, "If you haven't read Beloved, you cannot understand American literature thoroughly."After Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer Price and the National Book Critics' Circle Award for this novel, most of the critics attributed her success to the special black language used in her novel, or to the rhyming style which is like music. But so many writers of her time chose "slaves pursuing for freedom" as their themes and wrote in black people's language, why only Morrison's Beloved has achieved such extraordinary success and attracted readers all over the world?The author of the present paper believes that her employment of magic realism in Beloved plays an extremely important role in conveying the themes and producing the shocking effects. It is also one of the most attractive points deserving a detailed research in the artistic features of this novel, as well as an unexplored research field till now. So, a relatively complete discussion is given to exam the demonstrations of magic realism's artistic principles in Beloved and the ways they convey the themes of different concerns in the thesis.Magic realism, originated from Latin America, has three main artistic principles: 1, Confusing the boundary between reality and fantasy to create a magic world in which the reality is reflected from a special perspective. 2, Employing mythic patterns to endow reality with fabulous meaning and hint writer's attitude. 3, Utilizing magic form which is composed of modern narrative strategies such as "jigsaw puzzle" structure and "mirror-image" narrative technique. In Beloved, with a tight combination with the text, the three principles build up the themes of the novel perfectly from three different aspects: Firstly, exploring the physical and psychological harms caused by slavery, especially its harms to mother-daughter bond through the resurrection of a murdered girl's ghost. Secondly, after black people obtaining physical freedom, how to fight against cultural oppression and keep independence of their traditional values, which is conveyed in allusive ways by employment of various mythic patterns including western biblical myths, Africanmyths and so on. Lastly, pointing out the way for black people to cast off shadows of slavery and possess the free mind by adopting modern narrative strategies ?Morrison's employment of magic realism in Beloved has profound historical, social and culture reasons. Analysis of these reasons proves the combination of magic realism and Beloved is inevitable.Finally, the thesis concludes on the one hand that the limited analysis of magic realism can never exhaust the charm of the labyrinthine book; on the other hand, obviously it can be summarized that the themes are constructed on the basis of magic realism, which proves the essential position of magic realism in the creation of Beloved.