Community Lost, Community Gained.doc

Community Lost, Community GainedA Study of Toni Morrisons Novel BelovedContentsAcknowledgementsAbstract in EnglishAbstract in ChineseIntroduction1Chapter One: Introduction of Toni Morrison and Beloved51.1 A Short Introduction of Toni Morrison and Her Works51.2 The Background of Beloved71.3The Story of Beloved8Chapter Two：Community Lost112.1The Clearing112.1.1 The Clearing and Baby Suggs Imagined Community112.1.2 Sethe and the Clearing132.2 The Tragedy of Sethe15Chapter Three: Deep Reasons for the Loss of Community183.1Envy and Pride183.1.1 Envy193.1.2 Pride223.2The System of Slavery233.3Reciprocity27Chapter Four: Reintegration304.1The Role of Denver in Reintegration304.1.1 Denvers Sacrifices304.1.2 Denvers Heroic Status314.2The Efforts of the Community354.3The Role of Beloved in Reintegration38Conclusion40Bibliography42 AcknowledgmentsI owe the deepest gratitude to Professor Wang Guanglin, my thesis supervisor and tutor for my MA study, who has helped me immeasurably in preparing and composing this thesis with enlightening guidance and has devoted his precious time to reading and revising each draft with great care and patience. Without his constructive suggestions and advice, this paper would never have started and come to a completion. His expectations of me will spur me on to explore the unknowns and scale new heights in my future professional career.My gratitude also goes to all my other teachers in Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade for their informative and inspiring courses, to friends and authors whose books and articles I have read. From all of them I have learned a great deal which I am unable to attribute to whomever individually.Finally, I am particularly grateful to my parents for their unfailing support and for staying close no matter how great the distance.AbstractThe themes of racial oppression and community play an important role in African American writers fictions. Few American writers, however, have written about community with the consistency and commitment as Morrison does. Calls for the return to home and to community are longstanding themes of Morrisons works. With the thematic prominence of African American community in her works, Morrison critically explores the possibilities and limitations of community as a sanctuary from overt social oppression.Through analyzing the inclusion and exclusion of the community in Beloved, Morrison shows how homes and communities serve as places for African Americans to gather strength, formulate strategy, and rest, even as they are insufficient to the task of solving institutional and social ills.The history of racism in the United States makes it imperative for black Americans to resist racial oppression through collective acts of affirmation, empowerment, and resistance. For Morrison, the sites for such acts are the family and the community. In Beloved, Morrison adopts the historical genre of the slave narrative to reconstruct the traumatic history of slavery in the interests of present and future African American community.The thesis examines Morrisons literary construction of community in Beloved, discloses slavery and white oppression as the roots of violence in African American community and shows how African Americans developed their sense of community through the bond of the struggle. Key Words: community, violence, slavery, reintegration提要种族压迫和共同体这两个主题在非裔美国作家的小说中起着非常重要的作用，然而，几乎没有任何一个美国作家能像托尼莫里森那样持之以恒地把回归家园和共同体作为永恒的主题。以非裔美国共同体作为她的重要主题， 托尼莫里森探索了共同体作为躲避外界社会压迫的避难所的可能性和局限性。通过分析共同体的包容性和排斥性，莫里森揭示了非裔美国人可以在家园和共同体里获得力量和休息，即使它们并不足以解决社会弊端。本文揭示了奴隶制度和白人社会的压迫才是非裔美国黑人暴力的根源，同时显示了非裔美国人是如何通过斗争来逐步形成他们的共同体。关键字：群体，暴力，奴隶制，重建Introduction “Community” usually signals intimate, authentic, and deeply egalitarian social relations. When Raymond Williams summarized the history of the word “community” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, a book published in 1976, he noted that the different and overlapping usages from the fourteenth century on could be roughly divided into two categories. In one sense of the term, community indicates “actual social groups,” while in the other it signals “a particular quality of relationships” (Williams 1976, 75). Williams discussion primarily treats this second sense of community, highlighting the quality of immediacy, directness, and concreteness generally ascribed to communal relations. The concept of community he describes, and which still largely holds, is of an organic, relatively small, geographically bound social unit marked by attributes of spontaneity and authenticity. These characteristics form the “essence” of community.Williams remarks on the concept of community highlight its utopian dimensions rather than its physical geography. What Williams found most striking about community was the overwhelmingly positive connotations of this “warmly persuasive” word: “unlike all other terms of social organization ( state, nation, society, etc.) it seems never to be used unfavourably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term”(Williams 1976, 76). Though community can be said to occupy a medial position between nation and the individual, the public and the private, Williamss point about the way we have commonly conceived of communal relations is valid. When we talk about community, we talk about something good.Samira Kawash is more specific than Williams about the affective attributes of community. In the 1990s, she writes: “As we typically understand it, community provides the individual with meaning and purposes, with a sense of belonging to something larger and more powerful than the self”(Kawash 1997,176). Kawash elaborates on the intuitive understanding of community in express political opposition to the larger sociopolitical unit of the American nation; community, she writes, also provides its members with “a strong foundation for resisting the oppression of systemic and institutional prejudice that continue to structure American political and social life” (Kawash 1997,176). Though Williams, too, noted the link to alternative forms of group living and the “polemical edge” that twentieth-century usage has sometimes given to the “community”, the years since his discussion have served to politicize more overtly the concept of community, transforming it from a semi-private realm of authenticity to an arena of potential social and political empowerment.Since the rise of the new social movements, however, North American minority novelists have increasingly worked to develop strategies for critically affirming new styles of community as resources for psycho-political empowerment. Their works of fiction harness a variety of formal strategies in order to rearticulate the concept of community while simultaneously posing, with urgency, questions about the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at work in communities, about the uses and abuses of collective action, about group-individual relations. Styles of community play an important role in African American fiction. Moreover, the civil rights and later the black cultural nationalist movement had a strong impact on racial consciousness which continues to affect more recent literary representations of community. The politicization of community within and to varying degrees against the nation is a strong theme in African American writing, but also in the writing of other minority groups in the US. African American literature has a long, continuous concern with the concepts of community and race, and its theorists have developed critical insights into the possibilities and limitations of community that help illuminate styles of community envisioned by other minority writers.In this thesis, I examine Morrisons literary construction of community in Beloved. Ever complex, Morrisons neoslave narrative outlines a dialectical relationship between identity formation and community formation, and insists that both are shaped and upheld to a significant-but not absolute-degree by racist institutional discourses and material practices. For Morrison, the constructed character of the self and the community does not invalidate human agency, even though it may threaten to incapacitate it. Morrisons neoslave narrative can be seen as recovering antebellum and rejecting postbellum representations of slavery and slaves for the purpose of positing autonomy for contemporary communities of African Americans. Although the potential for interracial solidarity is implicit in Morrisons construction of community, Morrison has deep skepticism towards a program of integration.This thesis covers four parts besides an introduction and a conclusion. The first part is an introduction of Toni Morrison and her works, including the background of Beloved and the main story of Beloved, which gives readers a rough idea of Beloved. In the second part, by analyzing the clearing and Baby Suggs imagined community, the author indicates that the clear and boundless freedom to love and dance in the world cannot be sought by the imagination alone. The third part is an analysis of the deep reasons for the loss of community. This part discloses that the slavery system itself is the basic reason for the loss of community. Peoples pride and envy causes the breakdown of solidarity in the slavery system. The fourth part, which is the focus of the thesis, analyzes the process of reintegration into the community. Through the efforts of the brave girl, Denver, who is also a victim of being outside the community, and the efforts of other people in the community, the protagonists are reintegrated into the community at last. Beloved provides the clearest example of individual trauma rooted in social oppression being publicly worked out through the ritualized and critical intervention of a community of empathic witnesses: Sethe, the heroine of the novel, re-enacts but re-directs her murderous intentions, while the community revises its role in the original tragedy. In conclusion, by analyzing the sentence “This is not a story to pass on”, the author states that the tragedy should neither be forgotten nor repeated.Chapter One: Introduction of Toni Morrison and Beloved1.1 A Short Introduction of Toni Morrison and Her WorksToni Morrison, the first black woman writer to receive Nobel Prize in Literature, was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, U.S.A. Descended from pre-Civil War slaves, storytelling and reading were important parts of her childhood, and the supernatural was considered part of everyday life. The songs, stories, and womens gossip of Chloe Woffords childhood undoubtedly influenced her later work; a great part of Toni Morrisons struggle has been to create a literary language of black America that draws strength from the oral art forms of that culture. Morrison graduated from Lorain High School in 1949, and went to Howard University in Washington, D.C. She graduated from Howard in 1953 with a B.A. in English Literature, and a minor in Classics. From there, she went on to Cornell University to earn an M.A. in English in 1955. She taught English at the university level for several years before becoming an editor at Random House in 1967. In 1987 Toni Morrison became the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University. She is the first Afro-American female writer to hold a named chair at a university in the Ivy League. In 1996 the Board of Directors of the American Book Foundation presented her with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Morrison has been a member of both the National Council on the Arts and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She has actively used her influence to defend the role of the artist and encouraged the publication of other black writers. Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company. (from Nobel Lecture, 1993) Her promising first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970 and immediately established Morrisons reputation as a major literary figure. Since The Bluest Eye, Morrison has written six novels: Sula（1974）, Song of Solomon（1977）, Tar Baby（1981）, Beloved（1987）, Jazz（1992）, and Paradise（1998）. Her most widely read novel is perhaps Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted for film. Song of Solomon, which won the 1978 National Book Critics Award for fiction, is perhaps the most lyrical of her novels. All of Morrisons fiction, from her first novel, The Bluest Eye, to 1998s Paradise, explores both the need for and the impossibility of real community and the bonds that both unite and divide African-American women. She powerfully evokes in her fiction the legacies of displacement and slavery that have been bequeathed to the African-American community.Morrison has also published a volume of critical work entitled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and has authored Dreaming Emmett, a play produced in 1986.For more than three decades, Toni Morrison has touched, provoked, and entertained readers with her intricate tales of African-American family and community. Her work presents issues of class, race, and patriarchy with an intimacy that is poignant and often devastating. In an essay entitled Memory, Creation, and Writing, Morrison wrote of her desire to write literature that was irrevocably, indisputably Black, not because its characters were, or I was, but because it took as its creative task and sought as its credentials those recognized and verifiable principles of Black art. Morrisons understanding of history and literature lends her novels a magnitude that has made her one of the most respected authors in America. Toni Morrisons complex and richly detailed novels continue to haunt and move readers; their precise language and powerful evocation of mystery invite careful study and re-reading. In addition to being one of the nations most celebrated African-American authors, she is also one of its most consistently compelling voices. Morrison places broad topics such as racism and love in the context of everyday relationships. A master storyteller, she tantalizes the reader with pieces of information that are revealed in slow and meticulous ways, drawing the reader into increasingly fascinating portrayals of events which forever alter lives. Without moralizing, Morrison provides insight into both the love and the darkness that reside in the human soul.1.2 The Background of BelovedBeloved was inspired by a published story of a black American slave woman, Margaret Garner, who in 1851 escaped with her children to Ohio from her master in Kentucky. When she was about to be re-captured, she tried to kill her children, after the infamous 1870s Fugitive Slave Act, in order to save the children from the slavery she had managed to escape. Only one of her children died and Margaret was imprisoned for her deed. She refused to show remorse, saying she was unwilling to have her children suffer as she had done. Morrison later told that I thought at first it couldnt be written, but I was annoyed and worried that such a story was inaccessible to art.（Morrison 1989, 134）Beloved was published in 1987 and was a bestseller. In 1988 it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. At the center of this novel is an almost unspeakable act of horror and heroism: a woman brutally kills her infant daughter rather than allow her to be enslaved. The woman is Sethe, and the novel traces her journey from slavery to freedom during and immediately following the Civil War. Woven into this circular, mesmerizing narrative are the horrible truths of Sethes past: the incredible cruelties she endured as a slave, and the hardships she suffered in her journey north to freedom. Just as Sethe finds the past too painful to remember, and the future just a matter of keeping the past at bay, her story is almost too painful to read. Yet Morrison manages to imbue the wreckage of her characters lives with compassion, humanity, and humor. Part ghost story, part history lesson, part folk tale, Beloved finds beauty in the unbearable, and lets us all see the enduring promise of hope that lies in anyones future. The novel is an ambitious attempt to grapple with slavery and the tenacity of its legacy. Dedicated to the tens of millions of slaves who died in the trans-Atlantic journey, Beloved could be called a foundation story for black America. 1.3 The Story of BelovedThe central event of Morrisons intricately woven narrative is a brutal act of infanticide: After sending her three children ahead to safety, Sethe escapes from a Kentucky plantation known as Sweet Home. In flight, she gives birth to a daughter and arrives with the new infant at 124 Bluestone Road, a house situated near Cincinnati, Ohio. With her four children, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and the attentive local community, Sethe experiences twenty-eight days of freedom before the sadistic master of the plantation, a man known as Schoolteacher, catches up with her. When she sees his wagon approaching the house at Bluestone Road, Sethe takes her children to the shed out back and in a desperate effort to protect them-to put them all someplace where theyd be safe-she attempts to kill them, although ultimately there is only time to cut the throat of her eldest daughter, who bleeds to death in her arms. Schoolteacher returns to Kentucky empty-handed. Sethe survives with her remaining children, two sons and the new infant, Denver. After serving a sentence in prison, Sethe returns to 124 where she