Parody Of The Bible In Toni Morrison’s Song Of Solomon

Toni Morrison is the first African female writer who is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in American literary arena. With African traditional culture and Western culture as her received knowledge, Morrison writes her books with dense cultural allusions and her works are the result of cultural confluences. The Bible, as one of the major sources of Western culture, has found its way deep into Morrison’s works. Based on Linda Hutcheon’s theory of parody, the present thesis tries to interrogate and dissect Morrison’s use of the Bible to reveal Morrison’s complicated attitudes toward the Bible.Apart from the introduction and the conclusion, this thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter1focuses on parody of Biblical characters in this novel, maintaining that in characterization of Solomon, Ruth and Hagar, Morrison is informed by their Biblical namesakes. By parodying these Biblical namesakes, Morrison connects the fictional world with the Biblical world, revealing Afro-American’s yearning for freedom and the spiritual traumata brought to them by disconnection from traditional culture and assimilation into white culture. Chapter2explores how Morrison parodies some Biblical images in her Song of Solomon. Morrison’s parodies of the image of Eden in "Lincoln’s Heaven" and the number image "seven" in her creation of the violent racial group the "Seven Days" demonstrate that she intends to deconstruct traditional Biblical images to reveal the shattering of Afro-Americans’American Dream under racism and the extreme harm of racial revenge through eradicating violence with violence. And chapter3further clarifies how Morrison parodies Biblical themes of love, and sin and salvation. It is found that for Morrison, love on the basis of equilibrium is the only remedy to racism and sexism. Morrison agrees with Biblical view of sin and salvation, but she puts into them race, gender and realistic factors to probe into the future development of Afro-Americans.Research on parodies of the Bible in Song of Solomon from characters, images and themes in this thesis will facilitate a better understanding of the influence of the Bible on Morrison’s creation of Song of Solomon for Chinese readers and shine some light on studies of Afro-American literature in China.