An Ethical Interpretation Of Toni Morrison's Love

In the 21st century, black literature has become a new field of researching and has begun to play a more and more important role in American literature after experiencing more than one hundred years of strife. Toni Morrison is one of the most distinguished African American women writers. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, which made her the first African-American woman writer to gain such a high reputation. Toni Morrison, as an outstanding woman novelist with the double identities of American and the black, shows us many lively stories about blacks from a special perspective and with incisive words. Her eighth novel Love has drawn attention from readers and critics since it was published in 2003. In Love, she shows us a splendid drawing about a successful black man and "his" women in the novel. Between love and hatred is there abidance and betrayal of ethics. The author imparts certain ethical identity to characters in the novel, and every behavior of each character can reflect their ethical perspectives on love incisively and vividly.Ethics is a branch of philosophy, which is also called moral philosophy. This thesis analyzes the novel Love from three synchronic dimensions:moral ethic, family ethic and political ethic, which provides more foundations for understanding Morrison's connecting function in Afro-American literary tradition. The significance of this paper lies in that it is another new field for research on Toni Morrison and it has historical and practical bearing in studying Toni Morrison and her novels today when slavery has been already abolished but racial discrimination still exits.This thesis is mainly divided into five parts:Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction of the background and significance of the topic; a presentation of Toni Morrison, including her life, writing history, and literary achievements and introduces the research on Love at home and abroad.Chapter 2 analyzes three main branches of ethics:moral ethic, family ethic and political ethic reflected in black society and family. The close relation between ethic and literature will be also referred in this part.Chapter 3 focuses on different modes of love and their expressions in a moral way from five characters:Christine, May, Vida, Bill Cosey and L; two main sorts of family relations that can reflect individual family ethical consciousness:father-son sentiment and sisterhood; and the political ethical conception of Bill Cosey, May and Christine.Chapter 4 puts emphasis on depicting the deviation of ethics. The discussion will be developed in three aspects:moral destruction of Bill Cosey and Christine; family ethical distortion of mother-daughter, grandfather-granddaughter and couple relation; and political ethical violation of Bill Cosey, May and Christine.The last part is the conclusion, which concludes the analysis on ethical concept of Bill Cosey and "his" women, and discloses the implied ethical deviation and distortion under the beautiful veil of love, which provides us a new perspective to research into the internal world of characters in this novel Love. In addition, it figures out a direction for the existence and development of black women under double-pressure social circumstance.