توني موريسن: دراسة الموضوعات وتقنيات أعمالها الروائية المهمة

**د. عبد الله بن محمود** · 24/Mar/2010, 04:25 PM

الباحث: د / خالد صبري محمد سليمان عبد الله

الدرجة العلمية: دكتوراه

الجامعة: صنعاء

الكلية: اللغات

القسم: اللغة الإنجليزية

لغة الدراسة: الإنجليزية

تاريخ الإقرار: 2007
الملخص:

يهدف هذا البحث إلى إظهار معاناة وإضطهاد المجتمع الأسود داخل المجتمع الأمريكي الأبيض بشكل عام من حيث التمييز العنصري المبني على اللون والجنس.
وبشكل خاص التمييز المزدوج الذي تقع تحت طائلته المرأة السوداء من حيث تمييزها في المجتمع الأبيض وكذلك معاناتها تحت سيطرة الرجل الأسود أيضاً .
كل ذلك يتجلى بإسلوب روائي مميز تمتزج به الكناية والأسطورة والقصة الشعبية والخرافة لتخلق منه الكاتبة إبدعاً أدبياً مميزاً يعكس حقيقة ما يعاني منه السود في أمريكا.
تعتبر مواضيع الجنس والعرق من المواضيع المسيطرة والمنتشرة والسائدة في المجتمع الأمريكي . تستحق روايات الكاتبة المتميزة والتي صورت من خلالها وانتشرت إلى حد كبير ثقافة الأفارقة الأمريكيين دراسة معمقة وناقدة إضافة إلى دراسة إزدواجية الجنس والعرق الذي مازال يطوق ويحسر دور المرأة في المجتمع الامريكي بشكل سلبي.
بإحتضانها لمواضيع العرق والأدب النسائي لما يزيد عن ثلاثين عاماً أصبح عمل توني موريسن الأدبي بحاجة إلى دراسة ضمن إطار مناهج الأدب الأمريكي حول العالم. والغني عن الذكر بأن مساهمتها الأدبية تعتبر عظيمة إذا ما قورنت مع إي مستوى أدبي أخر.
حيث تصف الروايات التفاوت في الفروق بين البشره السوداء والقيم الثقافية البيضاء , وهذا يظهر تناقض الموضوع السلبي المتمثل في إغواء وخيانة المجتمع الأسود من قبل ثقافة البيض وإما الموضوع الإيجابي فيتمثل في البحث عن الهويه الثقافية للسود من أجل استمراريةالحياة بالنسبة إليهم في أمريكا .
تجسد وتستلهم الكاتبة الشعور وتتحسس الثقافة السوداء عن طريق وضعها في قالب يحتوي على الخيال والأسطورة إضافة إلى الأسلوب السردي المؤثر الرائع الذي تتميز به الكاتبة.
يشير إختيار توني موريسن إلى وجود إمرأة لتكون مركز ونجم روايتها لمدى إهتمامها العميق لإعادة بناء الثقافة الافريقية – الأمريكية وتاريخ العبودية فإن معاناة المرأة الافريقية – الأمريكية على يد كل من الرجال السود والبيض معاً جعلها تقاتل وتكافح من أجل البقاء سواءً داخل أو خارج المنزل – لذلك فإن قصص وحكايات هؤلاء النسوة , حتى في المجتمع الامريكي المعاصر محفوفةً بالمعوقات والمخاطر المزدوجة المتمثلة بالجنس والعرق . ورغم التحرر والتعليم والتقدم التدريجي في مجال العمل فإنهن ما زلن يتخلفن كثيراً عن النساء البيض والرجال السود.
تظهر أعمال توني موريسن الأدبية الظروف الصعبة البائسة التي يعيشها السود في أمريكا البيضاء إن مسألتي الجنس والعرق تساهم بشكل كبير في إظهار حجم الإضطهاد والمعاناه ضد الأفارقة الأمركيين فمنذ بداية العبودية وحتى وقتنا الحاضر يُعتبر اللون والجنس من أهم مسائل التمييز العنصري فقد تم عزل وتهميش ومعاملة العرق المختلف عن العرق العام بطريقة سيئة إلى درجة حرمانهم من حقوقهم في إمريكا.
لقد تم تصوير الدور الخفي للعنصرية القاتلة والمؤذية بشكل كبير ضد العرق الأسود وبشكل واضح ومؤثر في روايات توني موريسن.
تحتلف روايات توني موريسن عن كثير من الكتاب الأفارقة السود الأخرين أمثال رتشارد وايت ورالف اليزون فرواياتها تحاكي ذلك النوع من العنصرية الخفية التي فرضت المثاليه والفلسفة والعادات والمذهب الأبيض واعتبار كل ذلك مثال النسيج الأساسي للحياة في المجتمع الأمريكيلذلك تعتبر توني موريسن من أوائل الروائيين الأمريكيين المعاصرين الذين كشفوا النقاب عن الاوجه المختلفة للعنصرية الهدامة الخفية وذلك عن طريق اُسلوبها السردي الماهر والمتميز في الرواية.
تقدم الروايات محنة الأفراد السود العاجزين عن إتخاذ القرار بسبب تبنيهم لثقافة البيض المهيمنة في المجتمع الأمريكي ومدى قوة تأثير قيمها عليهم كما وتبين هذه الروايات مدى قوة تاثير القيم والمعايير البيضاء على حياة الناس السود المهمشين.
يلاحظ بشكل واضح بإن إهتمام توني موريسن الأدبي كما تظهرهُ تحليلات الروياتالست ويلخصها الفصل الأخير بإنتوني موريسن تؤكد بشكل يقطع الشك من اليقين وجود وفاعلية وقوة المجتمع الأسود في أمريكا وهو الذي تسمية الكاتبة الأفرقة الأمريكية إن ما يجعل روايات توني موريس قابلة للبحث وبشكل قوي هو إستخدامها لإسلوب السرد الفذ وتحليلها الغير محدود للمجتمع من حولها.

Abstract:

Toni Morrison is by far the best – known black American writer. She has achieved international prominence and popularity and is arguably the best exponent of black women’s fiction in America. Teachers of literature, feminists and readers of American fiction take her seriously. The conjoining of race and gender thematizes the black American experience in her fiction and the accuracy, honesty, and constructiveness of her portrayal of black life has been extensively noted by critics. Race and gender are dominant tropes of discrimination operative in American society. The significance of the images of Afro-American culture promulgated by her fiction merits a critical inquiry, as well as the double bind of race and gender, which continues to condition the role of black women in American society with attendant disadvantages.
With the embrace of “ethnic” and women’s literature in the last 30 years Morrison’s works have become required reading in American literature courses around the world. Needless to say, her contributions stand tall against any literary standard.
The novels discussed in this thesis include The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), and Jazz (1992). As Susan L. Blake notes, we notice in all her novels“a dialectic of values, alternative ways of being black, or female, or human. A basic disparity the novels explore is the difference between black humanity and white cultural values. This opposition produces the negative theme of the seduction and betrayal of black people by white culture and the positive theme of the quest for cultural identity” (Blake 1984: 188) for the survival of the black community. She fits the evocation of black culture into a mythic or fabulistic context with notable narrative effects.
Chapter One is an introductory overview of Morrison’s work. It outlines how in each of her novels Morrison emerges as an impressive crafter of fiction.To begin with, she insists on being known as a “black woman writer”.Her novels present a piercing look at the lives of the African Americans and scrutinize the influence of the mainstream culture on the lives of African – American women. Choosing a woman at the centre of her novels indicates her deep concern about reconstructing African – American culture and the history of slavery. Suffering at the hands of both white and black men, all Afro – American women had to fight for survival both inside and outside their house. Thus, their stories, even in modern America, are fraught with the constrictions and perils of the double bind of racism and sexism. Despite emancipation and education and their gradual progress with employment, they are still far behind black men and white women.
Morrison’s works signify the terrible conditions under which blacks have lived in white America. Contributing substantially to the oppressive trauma of Afro – Americans are the twin issues of racism and sexism. From the earliest period of slavery to modern times, colour and gender have been the main points for discrimination. The racially different people have been brutalized, segregated and denied their rightful place in America.
Racism took a subtle and deadly form and was deeply injurious to the black race. In Toni Morrison’s fiction the insidious role of racism is powerfully portrayed. Unlike the writings of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, Morrison’s stories deal with a type of racism which comes into existence when white ideals, white philosophy and white paradigms are forced to become the matrix of existence. Quite legitimately, Morrison is considered one of the foremost figures in contemporary American fiction for evoking the subtle but deeply damaging variant of racism in her intricately woven narratives.
Chapter Two deals with Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye. The novel presents the plight of black individuals who become chaotic by adopting the dominant white culture and its compelling value structure as their own. The novel explores the damaging influence of white standards and values on the lives of the marginalized black people. As we notice it, the narrative circles round an eleven – year – old black girl Pecola Breedlove, who is deeply humiliated and neglected by the circle of people around her. To draw attention, to make people love her, and to fit herself into the mainstream culture, she yearns for white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes. In the process she is driven into complete madness by her sense of ugliness. All in all, the novel deals with the powerfully destructive effects of institutional racism on individual African American community, which leads to dislocation, alienation and psychic erosion caused by the imposition of Euro-American cultural ideals on black people.
Morrison’s concern with the issue of freedom forms the mainstay of her second novel, Sula. The third chapter of the dissertation gets to grips with Morrison’s concerns in Sula. This novel, set in the little town of Medallion, Ohio, between 1919 and 1965, narrates the story of two black women, Nel Wright and Sula Peace. They each decide to explore things in the world in their own way, and in doing so they become two different faces of the same coin. It is the novel of the relationship between Sula Peace and Nel Wright; the two girls are friends since childhood. They grow apart when Nel marries and Sula leaves home for ten mysterious years. Both girls complete each other in an ironical way. A new concept of selfhood is developed through the double conflict of black females who are completely against each other in their search for identity, independence, selfhood and freedom.
Chapter Four goes into Toni Morrison’s succeeding novel, The Song of Solomon. This novel basically deals with the story of Pilate Dead and Milkman Dead. It narrates Milkman Dead’s quest for identity. The novel is based on a folktale, a group of African-born slaves who rose up one day from the field where they were working and flew back to Africa. In the novel, this tale becomes both the end of and a metaphor for the protagonist’s identity quest. The protagonist, Milkman Dead’s quest for black identity is at the centre of this novel. He comes to terms with his identity through his aunt, Pilate Dead, a woman who lives without the support of any man. The novel acknowledges the writer’s connection with her distant ancestors: the names Solomon and Sing and Milkman’s grandfather’s lost farm are parts of Morrison’s family history. Milkman, in the novel, sets out looking for gold but ends up looking for more important things along the way: his “family history”. Indeed, the novel narrates the saga of a black family.
Chapter Five examines Morrison’s engagement with the issue of racism and sexism in her fourth novel, Tar Baby. This novel tells the story of a black woman’s fascination with white values and of how she finds it difficult to come to terms with her modern materialistic aspiration in a complex social fabric. In this novel, Morrison no longer focuses on the black family and community. The novel’s Caribbean setting incorporates people from different cultures, all of whom are alienated from any sense of community. The social fabric in this novel is highly complex. Filled with inter- and intra-racial conflict as well as class and gender conflict, the Isle des Chevaliers is a microcosm of modern society.
Tar Baby focuses on the conflicts within this black woman, Jadine, who is caught between the pulls of two cultures. She emerges towards the end as a hard, shallow, materialistic person, wanting no connection with her folks and roots. She fully identifies herself with and achieves the internalized standards of white female beauty. She represents the cultural costs to the African American community of blacks who identify with white culture to the extent that they reject their own. Again, the novel tells the story of two young Afro-Americans whose love cannot overcome their cultural differences. Jadine and Son cannot endure each other’s world. The former has received education at the Sorbonne through the financial assistance ofthe millionaire Valerian Street, of whom her aunt and her uncle are servants; the latter, a deserter from a ship, is an uneducated, violent man who disdains cosmopolitan sophistication and feels comfortable only in the black community of his Florida home.
The theme of slavery is explored powerfully and in a daringly original way in Morrison’s ambitious novel, Beloved.It is mainly the story of a black female slave who develops awareness about her own subhuman status on the Sweet Home plantation, which ultimately awakens and forces her to develop a quest for freedom. The novel records the cruelty, violence and degradation, which make a female slave, Sethe, understand her situation and awaken from a deep slumber. Morrison shows that for the plantation owners, black slaves were in no way different from their cattle. By killing her own daughter with a handsaw, Sethe commits infanticide but retains her dignity as a human being. Thus, in the characterization of Sethe the novel exemplifies a new dimension of Morrison’s feminist consciousness.
Morrison changes the emphasis on the theme of slavery in her sixth novel, Jazz. Chapter Seven is devoted to a comprehensive discussion of this novel.Jazz, though musically titled, is not focused basically on music but rather on lived reality of the people and places that created jazz music. The novel probes and captures the salient flavour of African-American life during the Jazz Age. It has thematic breadth and narrative complexity. Morrison uses the mode of jazz to depict the experiences of the black community in the city of New York during the 1920s, a decade known as the Jazz age. It reveals the predicament of black women in white, racist, sexist America. Joe Trace, a black man in his fifties, is a salesman dealing in Cleopatra beauty products. Though he is otherwise a devoted husband, he kills his own beloved, Dorcas, when he believes that she has betrayed him.
The central story is a romantic love triangle involving a middle-aged married couple, Violet and Joe Trace, and Dorcas Manfred, an eighteen-year-old girl with whom Joe has a brief love affair. In this novel, Morrison concentrates on the daily life of a black couple who lived in Harlem during the New Negro era. The events take place in October through March 1925-1926, mainly in New York City, with flashbacks to time as early as 1855, as well as to towns and cities throughout the United States. Actually, the theme of racial discrimination and suffering has been presented in Jazz with conspicuous novelty.
Finally, the major concerns of the Morrison canon, as the analysis of the six novels bears out, are summed up in the last chapter of the thesis. Morrison’s emphasis on the presence and power of blackness cuts to the core of what she calls American Africanism. Challenged by the “inadequacy” of “literary whiteness”, she has responded to the “racist” imaginative act in her deliberately elliptical narratives from The Bluest Eye to Jazz.
To sum up, with skillful variations on her central thematic preoccupation, she has engaged with the interlocking hierarchies of race and gender. What makes her novels compelling as social inquiries is the deft narrative management of her stories as well as her unsparing analysis of the surrounding society, or, as William Grimes put it in The New York Times (October 8, 1993) after Morrison won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, “the faultlines of a society built on racial prejudice”.

[فقط الأعضاء المسجلين يمكنهم رؤية الروابط. ]
منتدى الإيوان
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24/Mar/2010, 04:25 PM	#1 (permalink)
د. عبد الله بن محمود عضو اللجنة الاستشارية للمنتدى تاريخ التسجيل: Jan 2009 المشاركات: 457 Thanks: 102 Thanked 85 Times in 44 Posts معدل تقييم المستوى: 4	توني موريسن: دراسة الموضوعات وتقنيات أعمالها الروائية المهمة الباحث: د / خالد صبري محمد سليمان عبد اللهالدرجة العلمية: دكتوراه الجامعة: صنعاءالكلية: اللغاتالقسم: اللغة الإنجليزيةلغة الدراسة: الإنجليزيةتاريخ الإقرار: 2007 الملخص: يهدف هذا البحث إلى إظهار معاناة وإضطهاد المجتمع الأسود داخل المجتمع الأمريكي الأبيض بشكل عام من حيث التمييز العنصري المبني على اللون والجنس. وبشكل خاص التمييز المزدوج الذي تقع تحت طائلته المرأة السوداء من حيث تمييزها في المجتمع الأبيض وكذلك معاناتها تحت سيطرة الرجل الأسود أيضاً . كل ذلك يتجلى بإسلوب روائي مميز تمتزج به الكناية والأسطورة والقصة الشعبية والخرافة لتخلق منه الكاتبة إبدعاً أدبياً مميزاً يعكس حقيقة ما يعاني منه السود في أمريكا. تعتبر مواضيع الجنس والعرق من المواضيع المسيطرة والمنتشرة والسائدة في المجتمع الأمريكي . تستحق روايات الكاتبة المتميزة والتي صورت من خلالها وانتشرت إلى حد كبير ثقافة الأفارقة الأمريكيين دراسة معمقة وناقدة إضافة إلى دراسة إزدواجية الجنس والعرق الذي مازال يطوق ويحسر دور المرأة في المجتمع الامريكي بشكل سلبي. بإحتضانها لمواضيع العرق والأدب النسائي لما يزيد عن ثلاثين عاماً أصبح عمل توني موريسن الأدبي بحاجة إلى دراسة ضمن إطار مناهج الأدب الأمريكي حول العالم. والغني عن الذكر بأن مساهمتها الأدبية تعتبر عظيمة إذا ما قورنت مع إي مستوى أدبي أخر. حيث تصف الروايات التفاوت في الفروق بين البشره السوداء والقيم الثقافية البيضاء , وهذا يظهر تناقض الموضوع السلبي المتمثل في إغواء وخيانة المجتمع الأسود من قبل ثقافة البيض وإما الموضوع الإيجابي فيتمثل في البحث عن الهويه الثقافية للسود من أجل استمراريةالحياة بالنسبة إليهم في أمريكا . تجسد وتستلهم الكاتبة الشعور وتتحسس الثقافة السوداء عن طريق وضعها في قالب يحتوي على الخيال والأسطورة إضافة إلى الأسلوب السردي المؤثر الرائع الذي تتميز به الكاتبة. يشير إختيار توني موريسن إلى وجود إمرأة لتكون مركز ونجم روايتها لمدى إهتمامها العميق لإعادة بناء الثقافة الافريقية – الأمريكية وتاريخ العبودية فإن معاناة المرأة الافريقية – الأمريكية على يد كل من الرجال السود والبيض معاً جعلها تقاتل وتكافح من أجل البقاء سواءً داخل أو خارج المنزل – لذلك فإن قصص وحكايات هؤلاء النسوة , حتى في المجتمع الامريكي المعاصر محفوفةً بالمعوقات والمخاطر المزدوجة المتمثلة بالجنس والعرق . ورغم التحرر والتعليم والتقدم التدريجي في مجال العمل فإنهن ما زلن يتخلفن كثيراً عن النساء البيض والرجال السود. تظهر أعمال توني موريسن الأدبية الظروف الصعبة البائسة التي يعيشها السود في أمريكا البيضاء إن مسألتي الجنس والعرق تساهم بشكل كبير في إظهار حجم الإضطهاد والمعاناه ضد الأفارقة الأمركيين فمنذ بداية العبودية وحتى وقتنا الحاضر يُعتبر اللون والجنس من أهم مسائل التمييز العنصري فقد تم عزل وتهميش ومعاملة العرق المختلف عن العرق العام بطريقة سيئة إلى درجة حرمانهم من حقوقهم في إمريكا. لقد تم تصوير الدور الخفي للعنصرية القاتلة والمؤذية بشكل كبير ضد العرق الأسود وبشكل واضح ومؤثر في روايات توني موريسن. تحتلف روايات توني موريسن عن كثير من الكتاب الأفارقة السود الأخرين أمثال رتشارد وايت ورالف اليزون فرواياتها تحاكي ذلك النوع من العنصرية الخفية التي فرضت المثاليه والفلسفة والعادات والمذهب الأبيض واعتبار كل ذلك مثال النسيج الأساسي للحياة في المجتمع الأمريكيلذلك تعتبر توني موريسن من أوائل الروائيين الأمريكيين المعاصرين الذين كشفوا النقاب عن الاوجه المختلفة للعنصرية الهدامة الخفية وذلك عن طريق اُسلوبها السردي الماهر والمتميز في الرواية. تقدم الروايات محنة الأفراد السود العاجزين عن إتخاذ القرار بسبب تبنيهم لثقافة البيض المهيمنة في المجتمع الأمريكي ومدى قوة تأثير قيمها عليهم كما وتبين هذه الروايات مدى قوة تاثير القيم والمعايير البيضاء على حياة الناس السود المهمشين. يلاحظ بشكل واضح بإن إهتمام توني موريسن الأدبي كما تظهرهُ تحليلات الروياتالست ويلخصها الفصل الأخير بإنتوني موريسن تؤكد بشكل يقطع الشك من اليقين وجود وفاعلية وقوة المجتمع الأسود في أمريكا وهو الذي تسمية الكاتبة الأفرقة الأمريكية إن ما يجعل روايات توني موريس قابلة للبحث وبشكل قوي هو إستخدامها لإسلوب السرد الفذ وتحليلها الغير محدود للمجتمع من حولها. Abstract: Toni Morrison is by far the best – known black American writer. She has achieved international prominence and popularity and is arguably the best exponent of black women’s fiction in America. Teachers of literature, feminists and readers of American fiction take her seriously. The conjoining of race and gender thematizes the black American experience in her fiction and the accuracy, honesty, and constructiveness of her portrayal of black life has been extensively noted by critics. Race and gender are dominant tropes of discrimination operative in American society. The significance of the images of Afro-American culture promulgated by her fiction merits a critical inquiry, as well as the double bind of race and gender, which continues to condition the role of black women in American society with attendant disadvantages. With the embrace of “ethnic” and women’s literature in the last 30 years Morrison’s works have become required reading in American literature courses around the world. Needless to say, her contributions stand tall against any literary standard. The novels discussed in this thesis include The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), and Jazz (1992). As Susan L. Blake notes, we notice in all her novels“a dialectic of values, alternative ways of being black, or female, or human. A basic disparity the novels explore is the difference between black humanity and white cultural values. This opposition produces the negative theme of the seduction and betrayal of black people by white culture and the positive theme of the quest for cultural identity” (Blake 1984: 188) for the survival of the black community. She fits the evocation of black culture into a mythic or fabulistic context with notable narrative effects. Chapter One is an introductory overview of Morrison’s work. It outlines how in each of her novels Morrison emerges as an impressive crafter of fiction.To begin with, she insists on being known as a “black woman writer”.Her novels present a piercing look at the lives of the African Americans and scrutinize the influence of the mainstream culture on the lives of African – American women. Choosing a woman at the centre of her novels indicates her deep concern about reconstructing African – American culture and the history of slavery. Suffering at the hands of both white and black men, all Afro – American women had to fight for survival both inside and outside their house. Thus, their stories, even in modern America, are fraught with the constrictions and perils of the double bind of racism and sexism. Despite emancipation and education and their gradual progress with employment, they are still far behind black men and white women. Morrison’s works signify the terrible conditions under which blacks have lived in white America. Contributing substantially to the oppressive trauma of Afro – Americans are the twin issues of racism and sexism. From the earliest period of slavery to modern times, colour and gender have been the main points for discrimination. The racially different people have been brutalized, segregated and denied their rightful place in America. Racism took a subtle and deadly form and was deeply injurious to the black race. In Toni Morrison’s fiction the insidious role of racism is powerfully portrayed. Unlike the writings of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, Morrison’s stories deal with a type of racism which comes into existence when white ideals, white philosophy and white paradigms are forced to become the matrix of existence. Quite legitimately, Morrison is considered one of the foremost figures in contemporary American fiction for evoking the subtle but deeply damaging variant of racism in her intricately woven narratives. Chapter Two deals with Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye. The novel presents the plight of black individuals who become chaotic by adopting the dominant white culture and its compelling value structure as their own. The novel explores the damaging influence of white standards and values on the lives of the marginalized black people. As we notice it, the narrative circles round an eleven – year – old black girl Pecola Breedlove, who is deeply humiliated and neglected by the circle of people around her. To draw attention, to make people love her, and to fit herself into the mainstream culture, she yearns for white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes. In the process she is driven into complete madness by her sense of ugliness. All in all, the novel deals with the powerfully destructive effects of institutional racism on individual African American community, which leads to dislocation, alienation and psychic erosion caused by the imposition of Euro-American cultural ideals on black people. Morrison’s concern with the issue of freedom forms the mainstay of her second novel, Sula. The third chapter of the dissertation gets to grips with Morrison’s concerns in Sula. This novel, set in the little town of Medallion, Ohio, between 1919 and 1965, narrates the story of two black women, Nel Wright and Sula Peace. They each decide to explore things in the world in their own way, and in doing so they become two different faces of the same coin. It is the novel of the relationship between Sula Peace and Nel Wright; the two girls are friends since childhood. They grow apart when Nel marries and Sula leaves home for ten mysterious years. Both girls complete each other in an ironical way. A new concept of selfhood is developed through the double conflict of black females who are completely against each other in their search for identity, independence, selfhood and freedom. Chapter Four goes into Toni Morrison’s succeeding novel, The Song of Solomon. This novel basically deals with the story of Pilate Dead and Milkman Dead. It narrates Milkman Dead’s quest for identity. The novel is based on a folktale, a group of African-born slaves who rose up one day from the field where they were working and flew back to Africa. In the novel, this tale becomes both the end of and a metaphor for the protagonist’s identity quest. The protagonist, Milkman Dead’s quest for black identity is at the centre of this novel. He comes to terms with his identity through his aunt, Pilate Dead, a woman who lives without the support of any man. The novel acknowledges the writer’s connection with her distant ancestors: the names Solomon and Sing and Milkman’s grandfather’s lost farm are parts of Morrison’s family history. Milkman, in the novel, sets out looking for gold but ends up looking for more important things along the way: his “family history”. Indeed, the novel narrates the saga of a black family. Chapter Five examines Morrison’s engagement with the issue of racism and sexism in her fourth novel, Tar Baby. This novel tells the story of a black woman’s fascination with white values and of how she finds it difficult to come to terms with her modern materialistic aspiration in a complex social fabric. In this novel, Morrison no longer focuses on the black family and community. The novel’s Caribbean setting incorporates people from different cultures, all of whom are alienated from any sense of community. The social fabric in this novel is highly complex. Filled with inter- and intra-racial conflict as well as class and gender conflict, the Isle des Chevaliers is a microcosm of modern society. Tar Baby focuses on the conflicts within this black woman, Jadine, who is caught between the pulls of two cultures. She emerges towards the end as a hard, shallow, materialistic person, wanting no connection with her folks and roots. She fully identifies herself with and achieves the internalized standards of white female beauty. She represents the cultural costs to the African American community of blacks who identify with white culture to the extent that they reject their own. Again, the novel tells the story of two young Afro-Americans whose love cannot overcome their cultural differences. Jadine and Son cannot endure each other’s world. The former has received education at the Sorbonne through the financial assistance ofthe millionaire Valerian Street, of whom her aunt and her uncle are servants; the latter, a deserter from a ship, is an uneducated, violent man who disdains cosmopolitan sophistication and feels comfortable only in the black community of his Florida home. The theme of slavery is explored powerfully and in a daringly original way in Morrison’s ambitious novel, Beloved.It is mainly the story of a black female slave who develops awareness about her own subhuman status on the Sweet Home plantation, which ultimately awakens and forces her to develop a quest for freedom. The novel records the cruelty, violence and degradation, which make a female slave, Sethe, understand her situation and awaken from a deep slumber. Morrison shows that for the plantation owners, black slaves were in no way different from their cattle. By killing her own daughter with a handsaw, Sethe commits infanticide but retains her dignity as a human being. Thus, in the characterization of Sethe the novel exemplifies a new dimension of Morrison’s feminist consciousness. Morrison changes the emphasis on the theme of slavery in her sixth novel, Jazz. Chapter Seven is devoted to a comprehensive discussion of this novel.Jazz, though musically titled, is not focused basically on music but rather on lived reality of the people and places that created jazz music. The novel probes and captures the salient flavour of African-American life during the Jazz Age. It has thematic breadth and narrative complexity. Morrison uses the mode of jazz to depict the experiences of the black community in the city of New York during the 1920s, a decade known as the Jazz age. It reveals the predicament of black women in white, racist, sexist America. Joe Trace, a black man in his fifties, is a salesman dealing in Cleopatra beauty products. Though he is otherwise a devoted husband, he kills his own beloved, Dorcas, when he believes that she has betrayed him. The central story is a romantic love triangle involving a middle-aged married couple, Violet and Joe Trace, and Dorcas Manfred, an eighteen-year-old girl with whom Joe has a brief love affair. In this novel, Morrison concentrates on the daily life of a black couple who lived in Harlem during the New Negro era. The events take place in October through March 1925-1926, mainly in New York City, with flashbacks to time as early as 1855, as well as to towns and cities throughout the United States. Actually, the theme of racial discrimination and suffering has been presented in Jazz with conspicuous novelty. Finally, the major concerns of the Morrison canon, as the analysis of the six novels bears out, are summed up in the last chapter of the thesis. Morrison’s emphasis on the presence and power of blackness cuts to the core of what she calls American Africanism. Challenged by the “inadequacy” of “literary whiteness”, she has responded to the “racist” imaginative act in her deliberately elliptical narratives from The Bluest Eye to Jazz. To sum up, with skillful variations on her central thematic preoccupation, she has engaged with the interlocking hierarchies of race and gender. What makes her novels compelling as social inquiries is the deft narrative management of her stories as well as her unsparing analysis of the surrounding society, or, as William Grimes put it in The New York Times (October 8, 1993) after Morrison won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, “the faultlines of a society built on racial prejudice”. [فقط الأعضاء المسجلين يمكنهم رؤية الروابط. ] منتدى الإيوان [فقط الأعضاء المسجلين يمكنهم رؤية الروابط. ] آخر تعديل بواسطة د. عبد الله بن محمود ، 16/May/2010 الساعة 08:02 PM

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