| Toni Morrison takes writing as a process of discovering, and her works show that her new discoveries often lead her to return to former subjects and come up with new ideas. Typical of Morrison, in Paradise, she reexamines The Bluest Eye’s subject of colorism and Song of Solomon’s subject of historical memory, and continues her concern, displayed in former novels, about class stratification within the black community. She either deepens her former thoughts or revises them. This thesis argues that the new ideas expressed in Paradise about the above mentioned subjects signify a Marxist turn in Morrison’s perspective.Firstly, Morrison’s increasingly intensified concern for intaracial class division, manifested all the way through her first novel The Bluest Eye to Song of Solomon and to Paradise, designates her developing class consciousness. Especially in Paradise, Morrison makes class division as a major problem confronting the all-black town of Ruby, revealing her recognition of class relations as vital among all kinds of social relations.Secondly, by inverting The Bluest Eye’s colorism in Paradise to show the tenacity of it, Morrison shows her realization that changes in the dominant ideology must be originated by changes in the economical structure. In spite of the efforts of the Rubyites to get rid of colorism, they only successfully invert, rather than subvert, colorism, and their inverted colorism is proved to retain the essence of colorism.Thirdly, Morrison’s different treatment of the subject of historical memory in Paradise from that in Song of Solomon testifies Morrison’s new historical view. In Song of Solomon, Morrison regards historical memory as the key to unify the African Americans regardless of their class status; while in Paradise Morrison takes historical memory as a vehicle for the dominant class to promulgate their dominant ideology and thus to assure class division. Morrison realizes that historical memory, a type of human consciousness, cannot lead to changes in the economical base, but vise verse.Paradise, in which Morrison shows a high class consciousness and recognizes the determinative relationship between the economical base and ideology, marks Morrison’s Marxist turn. |
