Jadine's Quest For Safe Space In Toni Morrison's Tar Baby

As the first African-American woman writer winning the Nobel Prize for literature, "Toni Morrison is both a great novelist and the closest thing the country has to a national writer". She has published eight novels to date "who, in the novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality". Morrison's novels emphasize the thematic thinking of loss of safe space caused by racial and sexual oppressions in the White dominant culture in order to exhibit complicated relationships between:family and community; individual freedom and responsibility; stereotypes and authentic self-image. As a result, it is available to pursue and reconstruct safe space by means of religion, mythology, folklores, and the memories of race, culture and history.Illuminated by the researches available at home and abroad, this thesis takes Morrison's transitional novel Tar Baby as its object of study. This thesis studies on the protagonist Jadine's quest for safe space from the critical aspects of psycho-analysis, Black Feminism and cultural geography.The body of this thesis is composed of four chapters. The first chapter serves an overview of definitions of safe space, Morrison's understanding of safe space and its significance to the survival of black women; then it exhibits safe space that Jadine aspires for. The second chapter focuses on the sources of Jadine's loss of safe space, including 'the uncanny', professional anxiety, etc. In the third chapter, through the juxtaposition of opposite attitudes held by Jadine and Son to the same landscape which in turn reflects its genius loci, it takes cultural geography as the strategy to explore Jadine's journeys for safe space. The last chapter focuses on Jadine's tri-consciousness as black, woman, and American which jointly construct Jadine's contested visions on aesthetics, stereotypes and blackness, in order to demonstrate the consequences of her quest.Based on a spatial and cultural framework and mainly from psycho-analytical, Black Feminist and cultural geographical perspectives, this thesis hopes to reveal Morriosn's rethinking of safe space of modern black women and hopes to rethink the significance of safe space to black race, its existence and future.