The Identity Reconstruction Of Women Of Color:a Study Of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy From The Perspective Of Black Feminist Criticism

Toni Morrison, as one of the most highly-regarded African American female writers, devotes herself to exploring the experiences and sufferings of African Americans, especially that of African American women, for they have suffered from multiple and intersectional oppressions of racism, sexism and classism.A Mercy is her ninth novel, in which she breaks through her former concerns about racial problem in her previous works by paying attention to both black females and females of other races and colors (including Native Americans and mulattos). On account of this, this thesis is constructed under the theoretical framework of black feminist criticism to excavate the identity issue of women of color from the lens of race and gender by applying the method of close textual analysis. In contemporary, especially when A Mercy was published, the notion of "post-racialism" was heatedly discussed. Under such circumstances, in a way, this topic shares a lot more realistic significance.In this fiction, all four colored women (Florens, Florens’s mother, Lina, Sorrow) were exploited and oppressed in a white-male dominated society due to their race and gender. They are objectified as chattels, haunted by the past, dislocated, alienated, etc., which eventually results in their failure to claim selfhood or achieve their subjectivity and identity. Then, they employ disparate strategies respectively to reconstruct their identity:Florens’s mother by "speaking out," Florens by "writing down," Lina by possessing both communal bonds and her own individuality, and Sorrow by claiming her motherhood. In the end, they all succeed in reconstructing their identity to different extents. Beyond the text, the context of this fiction’s publication cannot be isolated from the heatedly discussed notion of "post-racialism," which in effect was defined, used and distorted by mass media. It is not the end of racism, but a myth that hides the society’s continuing racial discrimination. In this context, by producing A Mercy, Morrison brings women of color-the marginalized and subordinated group-into the spotlight, inspiring people to reconsider colored women’s current identities and the myth of "post-racialism," and thus further reflecting her rethinking of nation-building:each form of binary separations would limit the potential of an ideal home.