On Gothic Elements In Toni Morison’s Beloved

Toni Morrison, the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature, is a brilliant African American novelist in the 1970s. Morrison has published eleven novels since 1970, which have established her position in American literary history. As a female black writer, she has a great insight into black women’s hardship from black American history and their real lives. Beloved, which was published in 1987, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. The novel is based on a real story of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who would rather kill her daughter than let her suffer from slavery. The killed daughter named "beloved" came alive as a lady 18 years later. Mother’s love and liberty seem to be contradictory in black American history.Many scholars both home and abroad focus on its theme study. There are a lot of research work on themes of love and individualism, black morality and psychology, construction of black subjectivity and identity, and religion. But, the Gothic elements in the novel is less paid attention to. Based on Beloved, this thesis focuses on study of the Gothic elements in it and Toni Morrison’s subversion and development to it. It will offer a new point of view to understand the Beloved.This thesis consists of five parts:three main chapters plus the introduction and conclusion. The introduction briefly introduces Toni Morrison and Beloved; and then the author illustrates an analysis of Gothic elements in Beloved. Toni Morrison subverts and develops Gothic novel not completely following its traditional conventions but creatively combing them with the historical reality of the African American people. Chapter One is about composition and style of Gothic novel. Chapter Two analyzes the Gothic elements in Beloved in details and studies how Toni Morrison subverts and develops the characteristics of the traditional Gothic novels by a close text reading-Firstly, Toni Morrison breaks the fictionalization of the traditional Gothic novels by setting Beloved in the reality of African American history. Secondly, she subverts the paradigm of the characterization in the traditional Gothic novels by creating the characters both as victim and victimizer and by depicting the vulnerable male and children images. Thirdly, she weakens the grotesqueness and terror by arranging the infanticide event to be narrated by the white and by using a kind of graceful and poetic language and beautiful images. Last, Toni Morrison breaks the Gothic narrative conventions by combining African American narrative conventions and the western literary conventions. Chapter Three mainly states the functions of the author’s subversion and development of the traditional Gothic elements in her novel. It helps the author rediscover the history, deepen the themes and denounce the slavery system.