The Rebellious Voices: A Lacanian Reading Of Sula

The racist and sexist structure of American society compartmentalizes its various ethnic groups, despises the blacks as inferior. What's more, black females are located at the margin. As one of the most prominent black works, Sula came out in 1973, written by the first black woman writer Toni Morrison that won Nobel Prize for Literature. The novel explores a world of inter-locking system of race, class and sex oppression which is seen as a threat to black women's psychological survival. Through unique perspective, profuse imagination and poetic language, Morrison describes a series of vivid black characters in her fiction, especially the rebellious Sula, who pursues her life on her own principles and persists in her way. In the whole story, Shadrack finds it difficult to attain his wholeness, while Helene's self-image changes totally confronted with different circumstance and Sula behaves totally unacceptably by the community.With much attention on Sula, critics of this novel analyze the themes and characteristic features of the novel. This paper, from Lacan's mirror stage, through analyzing the historical background, black culture and characterization of the novel, attempts to analyze the characterization of the characters in the novel. The theoretical basis of this paper includes Lacan's mirror stage and its object lies in probing into the arduous journey to pursue their selfhood and how some other characters lose the self under patriarchal and white people- dominated society. The object of this paper is to analyze the roots of the black's mentality from the point of Lacan's mirror stage and study the racism on the black.This paper begins with a brief introduction of Toni Morrison and focus on the literature review of Sula, which has already been studied from the perspectives of feminism, post-modernism, cultural approaches, and archetypal criticism while from character and theme point of view, Sula is regarded as a reversed trickster, great Goddess and New world woman. That is followed by the introduction of the contribution and impact that Sula has brought to the black, or even world literature. Following Chapter Two, the paper provides the theoretical foundation of this paper: Lacan's mirror stage and his view on the relation between self and other. In mirror stage, an infant begins to attain a wholeness of self by the image in the mirror:the other. It no longer treats the body in bits and pieces. Its self comes out of other and depends on other, by which it gains a wholeness of self. Later when the child grows up, we can see that and an adult still conceives himself through other people or the social and conventional rules. Mirror stage is a critical phase for people to identify themselves.Chapter three is divided into three parts, with the first one focusing on the analysis of various characters, the torturous images of frustrated men, Shadrack, who cannot tell who he is and later creates National Suicide Day to erase the pains and struggle deep in heart and Jude, who receives a lot of repression from the mainstream society, hoping to get a decent job and be something and turn out to fail. The women frustrated image is Helene, a typical black woman that accepts the white's conception and gets a totally two-faced self:one is the elegant and authoritative woman in the face of the black and the other is a disgusting and obsequious black woman in front of the whites. The last part analyzes Nel's journey of searching for a complete self and Sula's brave and revolutionary self.The final Chapter is the conclusion of this paper, probing into the pursuit of self of the blacks and the illumination of that Sula offers.