从《宠儿》透视美国作品中黑人女性的文学价值

题    目：     从《宠儿》透视         
               美国黑人女性的悲剧     
学    院：    语 言 文 学 学 院       
专业班级：    2006级英语062班        
姓    名：      郑    建    芳        
学    号：        106092045           
指导教师：         吴    青           
完成日期：        2010年 6 月         

 
ON THE TRAGEDY OF AMERICAN BLACK WOMEN FROM BELOVED

BY
 ZHENG   JIANFANG

REGISTERED NO. 106092045
SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE
ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY OF
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

JUNE, 2010

摘    要
《宠儿》是托尼•莫里森，这位唯一一位获得诺贝尔文学奖的美国黑人女性作家的一部巨作。它重点描写了黑人女性在奴隶制度下痛苦的内心活动。本文首先通过对小说文本的分析，解读女主人公塞丝与子女，丈夫，奴隶主的关系，通过分析塞丝的经历以及所受的伤痛，探讨奴隶制是如何影响并扭曲黑人女性。塞丝是一个生活在悲剧中但始终不放弃信念的黑人女奴。作为黑人女性，她处于社会的最底层；作为黑人母亲，她无法拥有自己的孩子；作为黑人妻子，她无法主宰自己的爱情。本文第一部分主要研究塞丝的悲剧，即身份，亲情，爱情的悲剧；第二部分主要分析悲剧产生的原因，即社会、个人和家庭因素。本文从这两方面入手，特别是研究悲剧产生的原因，来揭露美国黑人女性所受的肉体和精神上的双重伤害，从而更好地帮助理解和体会奴隶制度下美国黑人女性的地位与悲剧。

关键词：黑人女性；地位；悲剧；原因

 
ABSTRACT
Beloved is written by Toni Morrison who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1994 as the first American black woman. It mainly depicts the miserable psychic world of the black women under slavery. This paper first analyzes the protagonist—Sethe’s relationship with her children, husband and slave owners. Through Sethe’s experience and her trauma, it explores how black women are affected and distorted by slavery. Sethe is a woman who has a tragic life but never gives up her faith. As a black woman, she stays at the bottom of the society; as a black mother, she is deprived of her children; as a black wife, she can’t have her beloved. The first part mainly analyzes Sethe’s tragedy, that is her tragedy of status, motherhood and love; the second part analyzes the social, personal and family factors of Sethe’s tragedy. This paper concentrates on these two aspects especially the reasons of the tragedy to explore the physical and mental trauma that American black women endured and to help readers have a better understanding of American black women’s status and tragedy under slavery.

Key words：black women; status; tragedy; reasons

Contents

1．Introduction 1
2. The tragic life of Sethe 2
2.1 Sethe’s tragedy of status 2
2.2 Sethe’s tragedy of motherhood 4
2.3 Sethe’s tragedy of love 6
3. Reasons for Sethe’s tragedy 7
3.1 Social factors 7
3.1.1 Class oppression 7
3.1.2 Gender discrimination 9
3.1.3 The influence of community 9
3.2 Personal factor 10
3.3 Family factor 11
4．Conclusion 12
Acknowledgements 13
References 14

1．Introduction

Toni Morrison is regarded as one of the best novelists in contemporary American literature. As a prolific writer, her main works include The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved and Love. Toni Morrison is famed for her portrayal of African American life in her vivid novels, especially her portrayal of African American women and place and position within society. In her novels, Morrison profoundly explores the psychic world of the black people that involves race, love, friendship, sex, alienation, betrayal, and supernatural. It is Beloved that earns her praise and a place within a white-dominated literary world. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, being the first American black woman who has received the honor, for she was “in novel characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality” [1]20.
Of all Morrison’s novels, Beloved is the most striking one, not only because it won her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988, and later established her international reputation as a writer, but also it is Morrison’s most elusive, complex and fragmented work. The whole novel is divided into twenty-eight unnumbered mini-sections within three larger disproportionate sections, each beginning with a reference to the mood of the house——124. The novel, which is set in rural Ohio following the Civil War, contains multiple tones, voices, and shifts in time. Much of the novel takes place in the 1873 post-war setting and the past lies at the core of the novel and impacts the present. Sethe, as a mother, she chooses to kill her children, unwilling to relinquish her children to the physical, emotional, and spiritual trauma she has endured. As a slave, she is treated as a subhuman. As a wife, she is treated as a reproductive machine. Above all, she has a tragic life.

                        
 2. The tragic life of Sethe

In Beloved, Morrison examines the issues of race, gender, culture from different aspects, which results in the complexity of the themes. Morrison depicts the shadow that slavery causes on the minds of black people, especially on the slave women. Almost every black in Beloved is veil ed by the shadow of slavery. Sethe, the protagonist of the novel, is a proud and noble woman. Her memory is full of bloody wounds. She wants to forget the past and dares not to touch the terrible past memory. But she has to live in the circle of sorrow because it is hard to avoid the “rememory” that always flows out in her mind [2]8.
2.1 Sethe’s tragedy of status
Slavery and racial oppression have been the common themes in black literature. With a serious attitude to reality, Morrison collects writing materials from history. Although the slavery system was abolished about a century ago, the nightmare of slavery is still haunting in American society and black people are still suffering from the influence of slavery.
The black women are looked down upon for the colour of their skin all the time. Although the American Constitution says that everyone is equal in the society, in reality, colored people, especially the black women, never have equal rights and respect. They usually stay at the bottom of the society. For the white people, they believe they are, undoubtedly, superior to the black people; the black people are born to be slaves.
 In the society, men are considered to be independent, offensive, competitive, and rational, while women are such a group that most of them are oppressed by sex discrimination. Although “Everybody has his liberty and right” [3]9, female is unequal to male almost everywhere, female usually takes on all the housework, and takes care of the children. It is considered that women are born to be housewives. They are just men’s accessories. The black women are discriminated and ruled by the white society.
Morrison dedicates the novel Beloved to “six million and more” slaves and acknowledges the freedom that each slave yearned for. This freedom “constitutes having the ability to choose one’s own responsibilities and loving other people more than you love yourself” 12.
According to historical record, the first shipment of Africans began their lives in America as indentured servants, and for the next forty years, indentured but “free” blacks participated regularly in the work force of Britain’s North American colonies. Then the Middle Passage appeared. It refers to the slave route from Africa to America, during which many perished in cargo holds or jumped from the ships to death in the sea. “No one praised them, nobody knows their names, and nobody can remember them. Millions of people disappeared without trace, and there’s not one monument anywhere to pay homage to them, because they never arrived safely on shore” [6]5.
As everyone knows, slavery is the cruellest system in the human history. In the plantation, as Morrison says “men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody…who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized”. Salves are the property of the slave owners who can sell or buy them with the land they work. They have no right in things and whatever they may acquire belong to their masters.
In Beloved, Morrison carefully portrays the new master of Sweet Home, Schoolteacher (Sethe’s former owner), as such an enlightenment figure. After carefully comparing Mr. Garner with Schoolteacher, Sethe clearly realizes that either Mr. Garner or Schoolteacher regards the black people as mere working machines. So Sethe decides to send her children away to avoid being enslaved. She looks forward to constructing a new identity both for herself and her children.
Sethe is deprived of everything human beings should have, more importantly, identity. Beloved conveys the difficulty blacks confront in claiming themselves. The loss of the name becomes the most obvious evidence of her being deprived of identity. During the slave era when black families were inhumanly separated, naming one’s true name became a crucial means of keeping track, not simply of identity, but also of place of origin and family. The most dangerous effect of slavery is its negative impact on the former slaves’ senses of self, and the novel contains multiple examples of self-alienation. Sethe does not know the origin of her name, which causes her to suffer a serious identity crisis. She cannot realize her own self. As a slave, she owns nothing. She seems to be alienated from herself and filled with self-loathing. She believes she is separated into several parts.
The scars on Sethe’s back serves as another testament to her disfiguring and dehumanizing years as a slave. The scars w ork as a metaphor for the way that past tragedies affect us psychologically, “haunting” or “scarring” us for life. Beating is one way that the whites attempt to communicate their superiority over black people. This fact makes itself evident in further exploring the beating of Sethe by two white boys, nephews of the schoolteacher. The two boys robbed of Sethe’s milk and beat the pregnant Sethe, at the request of the Schoolteacher, making a permanent scar and causing her to lose feeling in her back. From the perspective of the two boys and the Schoolteacher, beating Sethe is a way to prove they are right. They beat her not only to cause her physical pain she would not soon forget, but also to leave permanent marks across her back which would follow her wherever she might go. Marks can remind her that they would never give her the freedom she has dreamed of and they have taken that right away from her.

2.2 Sethe’s tragedy of motherhood
In Beloved, Morrison indicates that denial of a mother’s right to love her children is the most panic experience of slave mothers to endure under slavery system. Mothering and motherhood are denied and obliterated by slavery since slave women are both workers and breeding stock with the advantage of reproducing without cost [7]3. Revolving around Sethe’s being slave daughter and mother, Morrison explores the subject of maternal love under the discourse of slavery.
The crime of slavery does not merely deprive slaves of their identity and personal dignity, and the possession of their own language and culture. The denial of a mother’s right to love her child, as Morrison reiterates, is perhaps the greatest horror of the black experience under slavery, racism and sexism [8]4. Slave mothers cannot even identify themselves as mothers.
Women slaves’ bodies are not only sexually abused but also their rights to be mothers are deprived of as well. Beloved is such a novel to explore to what extent mother and daughter bonds are destroyed. Slavery is formed on the basis that slaves are the legal property of slave owners. Under slavery, the fathers of the slaves are usually unknown. Therefore, slaves are motherless or fatherless, deprived of their mates, their children and their kin.
The slavery system puts women slaves into a vulnerable position, in which they can be easily taken away their beloved children at any moment. Mothers’ losing their children is described as a common phenomenon in Beloved. Women slaves are regarded as reproduction machines. Because of gender differences, women slaves are more fragile than males under slavery system. For every female slave, there exists the tendency to be raped and deprived of the rights to be mothers.
In one family, the relationship between mother and child is most important because the relationship between mother and child plays a crucial role in the whole life of the child. How the mother treats and fosters the child will deeply affect the form of the personality of the child. Sethe’s most striking characteristics, however, is her devotion to her children. In Beloved, Morrison carefully portrays the new master of Sweet Home, Schoolteacher, as such an enlightenment figure. Following Mr. Garner’s death, schoolteacher takes charge of Sweet Home. Cold, sadistic, and vehemently racist, schoolteacher replaces what he views as Garner’s too-soft approach with an oppressive regime of rigid rules and punishment on the plantation. Schoolteacher’s most insidious form of oppression is his “scientific” scrutiny of the slaves, which involves asking questions, taking physical measurements, and teaching lessons to his white pupils on the slaves’ “animal characteristics.” Under the schoolteacher’s influence, Sethe’s maternal love is distorted.
Sethe acts with her hands, killing out of her ingrained slave status, which will be passed on to every future generation [9]5; because in slavery humans treat other humans as animals without rights and reason, therefore slavery is worse than death, as death provides eternal life. Sethe has made the best choice in her mind, through her belief system instilled by her mother, for the sake of Beloved. The murder of her daughter and the attempted murder of her other three children are done in order to save them from slavery, to save them from an animal’s existence. Her actions, a result of being enslaved, demonstrate the extent to which she will “protect” her children from what she believes to be the worst possible fate. Sethe’s “too thick” maternal love propels her to run out of Sweet Home, and it is also this “too thick” maternal love, that propels her to commit infanticide. Sethe believes that she saves her children from living a life that is worth than death. She kills her child in order to save her from psychic death. Sethe’s claim may be glorious and righteous, but it brings her tremendous maternal loss and pain because she sacrifices “the best part of herself”. Due to the lack of mother’s love and oppression of slavery, Sethe’s mind is already distorted. She does not know how to love her children. “And if she thought anything, it was No, No. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Outside this place, they would be safe.” [10]6 Although written in the third person, Morrison records Sethe’s thoughts. Sethe sees the decision she makes as “simple”. She wants to secure her children’s safety, to send them “over there” into the afterlife rather than let them be pulled back to Sweet Home with schoolteacher. Sethe’s passion for her children infuses so much of the novel. Although she is seen as the only one to commit such a horrific crime, others in the novel do the same just in different ways and get different responses. In Beloved, although slave mothers go through some of slavery’s worst evils through motherhood, but at the same time, maternal love offers the strongest defence against slavery.
2.3 Sethe’s tragedy of love
Under slavery circumstance, women slaves’ bodies are severely abused. They have no right to choose whether to mate or produce. Many slave women are locked in a house and shared by several men. American slavery reveals its most significant elements--black women are valued not for themselves, but for the capacity to breed, that is, to “produce” more workers for the slave owners; and for their ability to nurture them until they are equipped to become “producer” for the society.
Sethe is beautiful and the five male Sweet Home slaves wait in agonizing sexual frustration, having sex with calves and dreaming of rape, while she takes a year to make a choice among them. She chooses Halle finally. In this sense, Sethe is lucky. She can choose her own beloved. Six-year marriage of Halle and Sethe is an anomaly in an institution that will regularly redistribute men and women to different farms as their owners deem necessary [11]2.
Sethe recalls that Halle loves her in a brotherly way, not like a man “laying claim”. However, beneath the surface of this seemingly positive memory is the fact of the inherent to the slave condition. Slaves are not permitted to become legally married because marriage means giving yourself in contract to one another, and slaves are already contracted to their owners. Halle is in the loft of the barn when Sethe is violated by schoolteacher’s nephews. He sees everything but he can do nothing. As Sethe’s husband, he cannot protect his own wife. What a tragedy!
Another man Paul D has desired Sethe ever since she arrived at Sweet Home at the age of thirteen. Paul’s presence helps Sethe reclaim authority over her own past. When Paul D cradles her breasts, Sethe is relieved of their weight. After twenty-five years of fantasizing about Sethe, Paul D finds the consummation of his desire to be a disappointment. He lies awake in Sethe’s bed and decides that her “tree” is nothing but an ugly clump of scars. As a result of his inability to believe his own existences, Paul D becomes depressed and tired. While a slave, Paul D develops self-defeating coping strategies to protect him from the emotional pain he is forced to endure. Any feelings he has are locked away in his heart, and he concludes that one should love nothing too intensely. His love for Sethe is limited! What a tragedy!

3. Reasons for Sethe’s tragedy

 Beloved shows us a long history of slavery in the south of America. In a plantation under slavery, slaves have nothing in the world. They endure the physical, emotional, sexual, and spiritual sufferings. They become to lose themselves. Three hundred years of slavery and racism have made African-Americans suffer great oppression not only physically but also psychologically. Black women live more pathetic lives since they suffer the interlocking oppression of race and sex, “a racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual”, because in their lives, it is “most often experienced simultaneously” [12]3.
3.1 Social factors
 From the beginning, Beloved focuses on the import of memory and history. Sethe struggles daily with the haunting legacy of slavery, in the form of her threatening memories and also in the form of her daughter’s aggressive ghost. For Sethe, the present is mostly a struggle to beat back the past, because the memories of her daughter’s death and the experiences at Sweet Home are too painful for her to recall consciously. But Sethe’s repression is problematic, because the absence of history and memory inhibits the construction of a stable identity [13]4. What causes the tragedy? The answer is slavery.
3.1.1 Class oppression
The history of African Americans has been a history of exploitation, social inequality, and discrimination. From the beginning of slavery in British North America around 1619, when a Dutch ship brought 20 enslaved Africans to the Virginia colony at Jamestown, nearly 240 years passed until the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution officially ended slavery in 1865. Slavery was first and foremost a creation of the wealthy, who sought a cheap and reliable source of labour to maximize profits in a highly labour-intensive plantation system.
For African-Americans, the most painful and humiliating experience in their history is the slavery system, which brings them not only inhuman physical suffering, but unforgettable spiritual hurts that lasts long after slavery. Under slavery system, the black people become slave owners’ prized possessions. In a sense, they are despised objects and human cattle by the merchandized system. In Beloved, Morrison discloses the slave owners’ physical and psychological control over blacks through the dehumanizing experience of Baby Suggs, Sethe, Paul and other slaves.
Black slavery was a product of economic motivations and the fact that blacks were in a weaker position to resist it than other groups. As the demand for slaves increased, Europeans paid Africans for purely commercial purposes. Nearly half a million African were brought by force to America, where they were viewed as property and bought, sold, used, and abused at the commerce of the white majority [14]5. African American history is often referred to as segregation because that was the dominant reality experienced by black Americans during this period. Under segregation, forced separation of the races and social isolation of Black Americans was the rule. The races actually became more separated from one another in the South after the end of slavery.
Social contact between blacks and whites is strictly forbidden. The blacks have no education and their intelligence is also lower than white people, the whites think the black people’s black skin is not clean, which causes the blacks to be a lower-grade class. In American society, generally, people hold the view that only the white people are in the main stream. They would like to divide Americans into several classes.
“White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way…they were right…But it was not the jungle blacks brought with them to this place…It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread…until it invaded the whites who had made it…Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.” (Morrison) In Morrison’s point of view, slavery corrupts and dehumanizes everyone who comes in contact with it, including the white slave owners. It makes them fearful, sadistic, and raving. Morrison depicts the jungle from a white person’s point of view—as awesome, exotic, and thrilling. The conclusion of this passage asserts that what the whites recognize and run from is in fact their own savagery. They project this savagery onto those whom they perceive to be their opposites. The passage derives its power from the way Morrison moves the images of the jungle around, so that, in the end, the whites are the ones who hide a jungle under their skin; they are consuming themselves.
3.1.2 Gender discrimination
Gender discrimination is one of the killers of black women’s identity, which is never to be forgotten. It’s unlucky to be a black, but it’s even worse to be a woman at the same time.
Women’s social status should not be ignored from the basic angle; they are playing an important role in human being’s reproduction, and they are the heroines when the society is evolving. However, women had been treated unfairly since the very ancient time when a family’s survival in the wild was determined by strong males, which made the males dominate the females.
The torture and trauma endured by the blacks, especially the black women under the slavery system are beyond words. Despite the racial oppression, black women under slavery system suffer more than black men do, because they are under sex oppression simultaneously. They are purchased and raped, and treated as animals because they are able to produce children as easily as animals [15]6. It is significant that physical abuse is humiliating, but the added emotional pain of a mother is devastating. Slave women at that time had no right to be mothers at all because they were classified as breeders opposed to mothers. They are enforced childbirth and alienation from their children since birth.
3.1.3 The influence of community
Beloved demonstrates the extent to which individuals need the support of their communities in order to survive. Morrison believes that black people should depend on the black community in order to survive and develop. Of course, the community should be a united and harmonious collective. Black community does not only mean a geographical area, it is also the African American’s spiritual home. It nurtures people and preserves history of the race. Black community is presented as the source of racial empowerment. Isolation from community means a lack of nurturing, caring and support which may lead the character nowhere and gradually undermines the solidarity of African Americans [16]3. For Morrison, the spirit of the black community exerts extreme influences on personal growth and the development of a complete self.
The isolation from community makes Sethe unable to read significant signs of her community. After arriving at Sweet Home to take the place of her mother, Sethe has nobody to talk to and teach her anything where she is the only woman slave. She has a difficult time with the task that is supposedly natural to women. Cincinnati’s black community plays a pivotal role in the events of 124. The community’s failure to alert Sethe to schoolteacher’s approach implicates it in the death of Sethe’s daughter. Sethe’s mother feels the slight as a grave betrayal from which she never fully recovers. The community is implicated in the tragedy of the infanticide because their jealousy and mistrust on the feast so palpably that it hinders Sethe’s perception of “dark and coming thing” 8.
3.2 Personal factor
The majority of the black characters in Beloved are unhappy, but it is unclear whether the white people are solely responsible or whether the black’s sorrows are to some extent due to their inability to come to terms with themselves and their past [19]2. Slavery is the main reason for Sethe’s tragedy; however, personal factors also play an important role in Sethe’s tragedy.
Sethe insists on sewing a proper wedding dress for the first night she spends with her husband, Halle, and she finds schoolteacher’s lesson on her “animal characteristics” more debilitating than his nephews’ sexual and physical abuse. She struggles with slavery. On the other hand, she is sensitive and fragile. She attempts to avoid encountering with her past. Her memories of the cruel slavery infuse her everyday life and lead her to contend that past trauma can never be really be eradicated. Indeed, even after she acknowledges Beloved’s identity, Sethe shows herself to be still enslaved by the past, because she quickly succumbs to Beloved’s demands and allows herself to be consumed by Beloved. “If you go there—you who was never there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there, waiting for you…Even though it is all over—over and done with—it is going to always be there waiting for you.”(Morrison) Sethe pictures the past as a physical presence, something that is there. The force of the past is evident even in the difficulty Sethe has speaking about it. She stutters, backtracks, and repeats herself as though mere words could not do justice to her subject matter. Only when Sethe learns to confront the past head-on, to assert herself in its presence, can she extricates herself from its oppressive power and begins to live freely, peacefully, and responsibly in the present [20]4.
3.3 Family factor
Sethe’s mother has a strong influence on Sethe’s life. In recalling the fate of her mother, Sethe brings to the surface feelings of anger, bitterness, and sorrow. In order to reclaim her freedom, Sethe’s mother had been willing to leave her child behind. Sethe found it difficult to accept the fact that her mother would run off and leave her daughter. Without explicitly saying so, Sethe felt personally hurt by her missing mother. Even though Sethe was familiar with the conditions of slavery, she couldn’t help resenting her mother’s incessant unavailability [21]5. Mother plays a crucial role in the whole life of the child. Recalling her childhood, Sethe has only been nursed by her mother no more than two or three weeks. For Sethe, her mother is mainly an image of a woman with a stooped back in a cloth hat. Wh at Sethe did later had some relations with her mother.
Beloved’s identity is elusive and complex. In effect, Beloved is the core of the novel and can be understood as the visible manifestation of slavery. Beloved is the trauma that people try to repress, but she is also the terrible memory that has to be faced. The interaction between Sethe and Beloved is given particular attention in the novel. Once Sethe reciprocates Beloved’s violent passion for her, the two become locked in a destructive, exclusive, parasitic relationship [22]7. When Sethe is with Beloved, she is paralyzed in the past. She devotes all her attention to making Beloved understand why she reacted to schoolteacher’s arrival the way she did. Beloved develops a strange attachment to Sethe. Beloved represents the untrained and undisciplined desire of an infant, who is unable to conceive of an identity separate from its mother and who thinks of its mother as its exclusive possession.

4．Conclusion

Through Beloved, Toni Morrison shows the tragedy of American black women. The novel unveils the physical and spiritual trauma by slavery, a devastation that continues to haunt those black people who are former slaves even in physical freedom. Opening with a Gothic story, Beloved gradually explores the effects of slavery on individual men and women, on black families and on the black community. It documents both slavery’s horrifying destruction and the survival of African people and culture. Slavery has irrevocably destroyed a great deal of African culture. Morrison acknowledges that history is always fictional, always a representation, yet she is still committed to the project of recording African American history in order to heal her readers. Instead of a playful exercise in deconstructing history, Morrison’s Beloved attempts to display the terrible experience in the black history and to reconstruct a spiritual history of the black by means of magic realism.
Sethe has experienced not only the material horrors of slavery but a spiritual trauma. As a mother, she is deprived of her children. In Beloved, Morrison has illustrated how the African maternal love has been affected and distorted by slavery. Morrison has depicted that maternal love can be women’s ruin, if they allow themselves to be consumed by it. The black women must fight by themselves to win the liberty and rights. Morrison let the maternal body speaks for the unspeakable. It speaks for the suffering and pain endured by the mothers when they are dehumanized by slavery. Sethe and her mother in Beloved endure pain and suffering inflicted by the institution of slavery. Sethe and her mother-in-law are regarded as property within white southern patriarchal culture, human chattel to be sold or traded. Morrison’s depiction of maternal love breaks the stereotype of the all-nurturing, caring and devoted Great Mothers. However, the mothers in her works are more real. These mothers are not perfect, and sometimes evern anti-maternal, yet they are not to be judged, they are to be sympathized, for they are too suffering. As a slave woman, Sethe has experienced ups and downs in life; as a wife, she cannot have her true love. What a tragedy!

 
Acknowledgements

My initial thanks go to my supervisor WuQing, who patiently supervised my dissertation and was at times very willing to offer me illuminating advice or suggestions. Without his help, I could not have finished this dissertation.
I am also indebted to other teachers and my classmates who have not only offered me their warm encouragements but also shared with me their ideas and books. They are WangJie, ZhengYelu, ChenLingying, and many others.
My greatest personal debt is to my grandparents and parents, who have cultivated a soul of sensitivity, hospitality, and honesty out of me, and offered a harbor of happiness and sweetness for me.
The remaining weakness and possible errors of the dissertation are entirely my own.
 
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[18] 马卫华. 论托尼•莫里森小说《宠儿》中的杀婴主题[J]. 文教资料, 2006.
[19] 王晓兰. 论《宠儿》的复调性[J]. 南昌航空大学学报, 2007.
[20] 卢春林. 在和谐社区里构建黑人主体身份[J]. 扬州大学学报, 2008.
[21] 张黎黎. 一场由黑人平等参与的狂欢[J]. 华中师范大学学报, 2008.
[22] 尹晓琴. 寻找失落的自我[J]. 山东师范大学学报, 2008.

诚 信 承 诺

我谨在此承诺：本人所写的毕业论文《从《宠儿》透视美国黑人女性的悲剧》均系本人独立完成，没有抄袭行为，凡涉及其他作者的观点和材料，均作了注释，若有不实，后果由本人承担。
 
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