An American Pastoral Perspective On The Middle Landscape Ideal In Morrison’s Paradise

Toni Morrison,the Nobel laureate for literature in 1993,is one of the most celebrated African American writers.Her works are noted for revealing racial discrimination and sexual inferiority,and her seventh novel Paradise continues such topics.The former studies,on the ground of various approaches,whether it is postmodern historical writing,spatial criticism or Foucault’s power theory,explore power relations between whites and blacks,men and women.Based on Leo Marx’s discussion of American pastoralism,this thesis argues that the novel,under distinct historical context,unravels the ideal of the middle landscape of blacks and women,which mirrors the historical process of race and gender issues from the aspect of living space.The middle landscape,the kernel of pastoralism,is a garden landscape between the wilderness and the city,which,from the perspective of American pastoralism,transforms into a garden with machine in it.Wilderness,garden and machine that deal with retreating from the city to the wilderness,reconciling the wilderness and the city,and reconstructing the middle landscape ideal in the age of machine conclude Marx’s illumination on the middle landscape ideal,depicting the pastoral and progressive ideals of America.In Paradise,8-rocks and the Convent women,with their wilderness experience and their efforts to construct idealized living space,are on the historical trajectory of American pastoralism,in accordance with which this thesis is unfolded.Chapter one is an introductive part that includes a brief introduction to Toni Morrison and Paradise,a summary of relative studies both at home and abroad,the elaborations on Leo Marx’s American pastoralism and the statement of this thesis.Chapter two analyzes the wilderness experience of 8-rocks and the Convent women.The ideal of the middle landscape initiates in the wilderness where chance and challenge coexist.Set the background in Oklahoma wilderness,the novel meets the imagination of the West as a promising land,which attracts the homeless two groups respectively to retreat from the American South that is encompassed by ingrained racial discrimination and the home space in which women are constrained to quest for idealized living space here.8-Rocks and the Convent women write the westward history from the perspective of the marginalized ones,and their wilderness experiences herald the western garden myth in the context of race and gender.Chapter three probes the all-black town and the Convent as plentiful and peaceful garden landscapes.Garden that reconciles the wilderness and the city reifies the ideal of the middle landscape.Here,the two garden landscapes dissolve the tension between the wilderness and the white supremacy society,and that between the wilderness and the patriarchic society,thus demonstrating the poetic dwelling of the marginalized ones.Chapter four is about the reconstruction of the middle landscape ideal in the age of machine.As a counterforce,machine is of the essence of acknowledging the reality of history.In the novel,two pastoral designs—sentimental pastoralism that is on the basis of nostalgia and complex pastoralism on the reality of history,are the products of agricultural mechanization in the West,and exert different influences on the reconstruction of the middle landscape ideal.It proves that it is the complex pastoralism that contributes to the reconstruction;that is to say,the marginalized ones should return to the mainstream society to fight for their civil rights as social movements thrive in the 1960 s and 1970 s.Chapter five concludes the experimental proprieties of the novel as well as the efforts blacks and women make to change the marginalized status,and eventually points out that race and gender issues should be reconsidered under the contemporary context.The middle landscape ideal contributes to the model of idealized living space,and serves as a historical perspective that presents the chances and challenges blacks and women face under different historical backgrounds.The novel eventually enlightens blacks and women to envisage a bright future instead get into the rut of the past.