A Functional Stylistic Approach To The Study Of Toni Morrison’s Novel Beloved

Toni Morrison is an African-American black woman writer, who is best known for herPulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved. In this well known modern black women novel, ToniMorrison tells readers a story based on the true antebellum story of a slave mother, MargaretGarner who killed her own children for them to get rid of slavery.“Beloved” in Morrison’snovel is the word on the tombstone of the baby girl killed by its mother, Sethe Suggs.Eighteen years passed when Beloved as a baby ghost comes to her mother’s house at124Bluestone Road for revenge. Beloved represents the memory of the past; she is able to makeSethe, Baby Suggs, Paul D, and Denver confronts the original trauma as well as reunite theirpresent and future. This thesis emphasizes a stylistic analysis of the novel Beloved by usingsystemic functional linguistics as the theoretical framework.This thesis firstly presented the basic theoretic framework of the functional stylistics inwhich the three metafunctions of language were reviewed. Then the theories the authoradopted were applied to analyze the novel in Chapter Four, analyzing the novel from the threemetafunctional perspectives: ideational, interpersonal and textual functions. The threemetafunctions are realized by transitivity system, mood and modality system and thematicstructure respectively。Some findings are made from detailed analysis of the selected passages from functionalstylistic perspective. Firstly, the author applies transitivity analysis to explore the processesthe main characters act and further interprets their characteristics. Secondly, the interpersonalanalysis of the dialogue between different people indicates that mood and modality systemchanges with different social relationships. Moreover, it can also reveal different attitudes andstatus of the four main characters in communication. Thirdly, the textual analysis of this novel from the thematic structure perspective enables us to get a general view of the distinguishingfeatures of this novel. Meanwhile, the author also applies cohesion to the analysis of thetextuality of this novel.Through the stylistic analysis of the novel Beloved by using Halliday’s FunctionalGrammar, this thesis studies the personalities of and the social relationships between the fourmain characters, probes into the theme and the distinguishing textual features of this novel,and further approves that Functional Stylistics is a helpful and meaningful tool forinterpreting, evaluating and appreciating literary works.