Toni Morrison’s Destruction And Reconstruction Of Greek Medea Myth In Beloved

Toni Morrison, born in Ohio in1931, is no doubt one of the best representative of the American black woman literature and a major voice in African American writing. Up to now, she has published nine novels:The Bluest Eye in1970, Sula in1973, Song of Solomon in1977, Tar Baby in1981, Beloved in1987, Jazz in1992, Paradise in1998, Love in2003and A Mercy in2008. Among these works, Beloved is regarded by many critics and scholars as her most successful and impressive novel in the history of African American literature. This novel led Morrison to a Nobel Prize winner in1993, which made her in the meantime became the first African American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. Ever since, Toni Morrison’s Beloved has drawn a lot of attention from a group of critics both at home and abroad.There are lots of articles and essays that study this novel. A great number of theoretical approaches have been used to research this novel, such as Postmodernism, Feminist criticism, Structuralism, Postcolonial criticism, Marxist criticism and Psychoanalytic criticism. Western critics generally believed that Morrison had inherited the African American narrative traditions. Among critical theories of Beloved, however, Myth and Archetypal criticism has attracted few critics’attention. In the basis of the literary approach of myth and archetypal criticism,"Myth" in its most ordinary meaning refers to stories of gods or other supernatural beings handed down from ancient times. A collection of traditional myths in a culture or nation reflects its cultural or national history. Writers turn to myths as sources of inspiration. The modern concept of the archetype appeared in the late nineteenth century, referring to the recurring literary phenomena such as motifs, themes, and narrative designs. Myths and archetypes thus offered the literary critic one more alternative, in addition to the generic or the historical, to questions concerning literary tradition.It is obvious that Toni Morrison associates Beloved with African, African American and Greek myth, but one of the most distinctive characteristics of this novel is her destruction and reconstruction of classical Greek myths which are present everywhere in this story. Therefore, it is rather convincing to make further study on Beloved in the basis of Myth and Archetypal criticism to explore a new perspective to understand Morrison’s works. The thesis consists of two chapters apart from Introduction and Conclusion. The introduction chapter offers a brief assessment of Toni Morrison and her novel Beloved. Chapter two discusses the theory of Myth and Archetypal criticism by which the thesis will borrow to explore Toni Morrison’s unique way of creating characters in novel Beloved. Chapter three will focus on Morrison’s perfect use of Greek myth. In this chapter, first, the thesis will look at the popularity of the employment of Greek myth in African American literature. Second, as one of the representative African American writers, Toni Morrison shows her own interest in Greek myth and gives special concerns with Medea myth. Third, the thesis draws parallels between Euripides’play Medea with Beloved. Therefore, it seems to be important to discover the similarities and differences between these two works in order to prove Morrison’s obvious destruction and reconstruction of the mythic archetype Medea. The following Chapter places emphasis on the significance and function of Morrison’s reworking of the Medea myth. The last part draws a conclusion on the basis of Morrison’s destructive and reconstructive use of the classical Greek myths.