The Empowerment Of Mother's Story To The Daughters In Beloved

Beloved, published in 1987, is written by Toni Morrison, the first black American woman writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Love is Morrison's major concerns in all her works. In Beloved, Morrison probes deeply into to the unbounded but distorted maternal love under slavery. Morrison maintains that the disintegration of family and the denial of a mother's right to love her children is the greatest horror of slavery. Under slavery, the black mothers are devalued as breeders, and their children are sold away from them as livestock. Separated from their mother and deprived of maternal love, the black children develop a wrong understanding towards their mother. As a result, most of the slave women's descendants suffer from a loss of identity, which is the main source of black people's psychological distress. At the same time, due to the peculiar sometimes even violent expressions of maternal love under slavery, the images of black mothers are seriously and unjustly damaged. In order to reshape the images of the black mothers and reconstruct the history of the black motherhood, Morrison penetrates deeply into the unknown story of the black mothers and daughters and encourages them to confront the painful past to make sense of the present trauma. In fact, the characters in Beloved, mostly mothers and daughters, are living in the painful conflict between the imperative to remember and the desperate need to forget.However, in spite of Morrison's solemn intention in presenting the black mothers' story, the black mothers are not always interpreted with the understanding they deserve. In stead of approaching the violent expression of maternal love in the context of slavery, some people even criticize that Morrison seriously damages the images of black mothers by revealing the cruel act of the black mothers. Starting from this misinterpretation, this thesis attempts to piece together the black mothers' stories and put the mothers' personal stories in the big historical background. In order to prove the empowering nature of the black mothers, this thesis presents two contrasting groups of black daughters. The first group is typified by Sethe's dead daughter Beloved. Due to the violent death at her mother's hand when she is only two years old, Beloved is deprived of the opportunity to understand her mother's story. This inability to understand her mother's love results in her irredeemable loss of identity. On the other hand, Denver and Sethe represent the other group of daughters, who after a painful period of misunderstanding their mother's story finally come home to their mothers' love and thus empower themselves to complete the sense of self-value and to take on the responsibility of being an empowering black mother themselves. All in all, through reconstructing the history of the black mothers, this thesis puts forward that the black mothers' story can only be understood in the context of slavery, and this understanding will eventually help to affirm the centrality of the loving black motherhood which will definitely empower the black daughters to confront the oppression that still exists in the white-dominated world.