A Prison Within A Prison

As the first black female writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature,Toni Morrison has marked a major milestone for American black literature to step into the center from the margin.In Paradise(1998),her first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993,Morrison depicts a carceral society featuring a unique mode of panopticism—a prison within a prison in the text.This thesis makes a Foucauldian reading on Paradise through the critical lens of discipline and punish.The structure of the thesis is as follows:Introduction provides information about Toni Morrison and her work Paradise,together with a comprehensive literature review,presents the theoretical framework of the thesis,announces thesis statement and reveals the significance of the present study.Chapter One scrutinizes the unique panopticon pattern Morrison has shown and examines how black people live in the carceral society of America and in the carceral town of Ruby.The totally enclosed Ruby makes itself a prison within a prison for the townspeople.Chapter Two studies what disciplining means are used in Ruby and how the docile bodies come into being under the disciplining system.The stories of the old fathers,the rules of God and the blood rule of Ruby play key parts in the process of producing docile bodies.Chapter Three focuses on how the oppressed including the young generation and the Convent women rebel against the patriarchs’ authority and what punishments they suffer.Conclusion gives a concise conclusion.According to Foucault’s discipline and punish,Morrison criticizes many issues including the racism,hegemonism and isolationism during the disciplining in Ruby,and explores the resistance of the oppressed and what punishment they suffer,disclosing the dilemma and challenge that black people have to be confronted with between the lines of this novel.