Black Shadow In Light Of Myth

Toni Morrison is a black woman writer, whose works are deeply concerned about the awakening and development of black women's self consciousness. Sula is Morrison's early novel which explores the painful experiences of black women's self-identity seeking, focusing on Sula's rebellion against established rules. This thesis is a tentative endeavor to examine Sula's experience as a self-definer thus to argue that black women's self-actualization is in a dilemma. To address this topic, myth-archetypal approach is employed as a particular point of view for this paper.To start with, the thesis draws a brief review of myth-archetypal criticism. Based on the findings of the psychology and anthropology, myth-archetypal approach studies the particular elements such as religion, rituals, myth and psyche in the literary works, and explores the mythical patterns and the collective unconscious. The myth critic is concerned to focus on connections between literature images and mythical archetypes. Frye believes that myth is a "structural organizing principle of literary form" and that an archetype is essentially an "element of one's literary experience" while "literature is a displaced myth". Archetypes are vehicles which recur in the form of characters, plots, and themes in different times and various genres. Understanding and analyzing the metaphor and symbolism within myth and archetype in the specific context is one of the important approaches to mastery at the themes of literary works.Morrison is familiar with the Bible and Greek myth and explores the possibility of discovering symbolic meaning from within. Her mastery at using archetype as a powerful vehicle for Sula's characters and themes is also obvious and fascinating. In the process of writing Sula, Morrison employs a series of emblems of mythical archetypes for references in order to portray and foil the characters and the motifs. My discussion of Sula is filtered through revising Ulysses (the questing archetype); Satan archetype, scapegoat archetype from Greek myth and the Bible. It, further, explores that Sula's characters and theme are the replacement metamorphosis of these archetypes in the specific black folk culture and tradition. These archetypes to which Morrison alludes subsume and reflect Sula's dogged individualism, intractability, vagrancy, rebel, malignancy, ostracizing naming, short life, obvious and implied death. Thus Sula isdivined as a "new black woman" by Morrison. In the first place, Sula's journey to being in search of self, which reveals the pain and difficulties of self-definition that the modern black women are confronted with, displaces Ulysses' story. However, Morrison revisions the motif of men's roaming outside and the hero pattern of Ulysses and creates a female Ulysses image. Secondly, Sula's rebellions are the replacement of Satan from the Bible. Satan is incarnations of both a rebel and a devil. Morrison relates Satan to both Sula's spirit of resisting against tradition and searching for freedom and a classic type of evil force. In addition, though Sula undergoes self-exploration as possibly as she can, she is considered as the "pariah" of the community owing to her rebellious actions and extreme "evils". Undoubtedly, Sula is the greatest scapegoat in the Bottom. It is evident that Morrison has ironized and deconstructed this classical archetype because the pariah Sula's blood has not brought about any fortune and wealth to the residents. Summarily, Morrison redesigns and displaces these archetypes metamorphically to Sula so well that they validate Sula's image.After mythical analysis in practice on Sula, the thesis seeks to use shadow archetype rooted in Jungian collective unconsciousness to explore the reason of Sula's failure as a self-definer. In the course of Sula's self-defining, she experiences exploring and resisting but ends up as a victim. Her failure is caused by the shadows from her family, her community even the whole society. And it is the heavy traumas of the black people due to racial discrimination and gender oppression that consist of the dark shadows in her times.Built on the documentation of Sula's transgressing tradition and probing of selfhood, the thesis is meant to compare Sula's pain and solitude as a new black woman with those of Nel as a traditional wife and mother designed by the community. The paper applauds that Morrison not only applies the quest archetype to self-identity seeking of the black women in the whole novel, but she also deconstructs this classical type. The originally constructive meaning about Ulysses is about his successfully achieving the goal as a hero image. However, Morrison grants Sula, Nel even Eva an failure in self-actualization and affirmation. In a new perspective manifestation Morrison explores the issue of how the black women position themselves and intimates the dilemmatic choices of their self defining.In conclusion, in each of her novels Morrison is deeply concerned with the racial and sexual ills which plague modern-day America. This paper identifies Sula as a studyof the personal struggle for self-realization and affirmation of the black women under the background of gender oppression. Sula lands itself well to a new interpretation and exploration by myth critic. And the issue of black women's self-definition raised by Morrison is critical in myth-archetypal context. Morrison claims that black women's liberation cannot be divorced from their traditional culture and insists that any quest for self-actualization would be fruitless with no basis of black folk tradition. Sula's placing herself as both "a new black woman" and a female African-American scapegoat, reflects the problem of the path to the positioning of black women in the specific black society. Her resisting against orthodoxy illustrates the belief that black women also belong to human beings. But unfortunately her self-seeking is deviated from traditional ground. Morrison holds that only the combination of Sula and Nel is the key way to black women's self-realization. Only through rooting in the black folk tradition and culture and reconnecting the integrity and balance of male-female individuality and relationship as a comrade can black women achieve their self-realization and affirmation.