Chapter 1 Literature Review文献综述
1.1 Studies on Beloved Abroad国外宠儿研究
自出版以来，对“宠儿”的不断解读一直在国外进行。
至于小说中的人物研究，在文章“女儿的意义（历史）：托尼莫里森的爱人的例子”（1992）中，阿什拉夫·A·拉什迪非常强调女儿“宠儿”的历史象征意义。他认为，虽然“爱人”这个角色是“对奴隶制度的非人性化功能的不懈批评的象征”，并体现了必须被人们记住以致被遗忘的过去，但丹佛则表示“拥抱一瞥，爱好”看来，需要记住“她成了希望的地方。 （Rushdy，1992：578）Teresa N. Washington的文章“Toni Morrison's Beloved中的母女关系”（2005）研究了母女之间的关系，并指出“母亲和女儿的母亲不是摧毁他们的后代。引用塞特的话说，他们把它们放在“他们安全的地方”（华盛顿，2005：174）。奥利维亚·M·帕斯（Olivia M. Pass）的中心是在他的文章“托尼莫里森的宠儿：悲伤的痛苦之旅”（2006）中解释人物的心理情绪。在“声音的恢复力：托尼莫里森的宠儿的共同宣泄案例”（2007年）中，罗克珊·里德探讨了黑人女性所扮演的精神领导角色。
Continuous interpretations on Beloved have been going on abroad since it was published.As to studies on the characters in the novel, in the essay “Daughters Signifyin(g) History: The Example of Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (1992), Ashraf H. A. Rushdy places great emphasis on the historical symbolic connotation of the daughter Beloved. He holds the view that while the character Beloved is “a symbol of an unrelenting criticism of the dehumanizing function of the institution of slavery” and embodies the past that must be remembered so as to be forgotten, Denver signifies “the embracing glance, the loving view, the need to remember” and she becomes the site of hope. (Rushdy, 1992: 578) Teresa N. Washington’s article “The Mother-Daughter àjé Relationship in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (2005) does research on the relationship between mother and daughter, pointing out that “[t]ormented mothers of àjé are not destroying their progeny. To quote Sethe, they are putting them ‘where they’d be safe’” (Washington, 2005: 174). Olivia M. Pass centers on giving an explanation of the psychological emotions of the characters in his essay “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Journey through the Pain of Grief” (2006). In the article “The Restorative Power of Sound: A Case of Communal Catharsis in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (2007), Roxanne R. Reed probes into the spiritual leading role which the black women play.
Considering studies on the themes of the novel, Barbara Schapiro analyzes the theme of love and self in his paper “The Bonds of Love and the Boundaries of Self in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (1991), holding the view that “[t]he free, autonomous self, Beloved teaches, is an inherently social self, rooted in relationship and dependent at its core on the vital bond of mutual recognition” (Schapiro, 1991: 209). In the essay “Narrating the Self: Aspects of Moral Psychology in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (1997), Thomas M. Linehan explores the moral psychology problems of the black. In the article “Violence, Home and Community in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (1999), Nancy Jesser studies home and community of the black, maintaining that “Beloved shows both the dystopian and utopian properties of the space named ‘home’ and the people named ‘community’” (Jesser, 1999: 328). Peggy Ochoa’s paper “Morrison’s Beloved: Allegorically Othering ‘White’ Christianity” (1999) delves into religious theme of the novel. Mary J. S. Elliott’s main concern in her essay “Postcolonial Experience in a Domestic Context: Commodified Subjectivity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (2000) is the subjectivity and identity construction of the black. Robert Fallon concentrates on the theme of music and memory in his article “Music and the Allegory of Memory in ‘Margaret Garner’” (2006).
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1.2 Studies on Beloved at Home
When Toni Morrison visited China with an American writer delegation in 1985, her name or her works were familiar to few people in China. The studies on Beloved were almost non-existent except for Wang Youxuan and Luo Xuanmin’s articles. As the news of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature reached China, a good many Chinese scholars began to attach greater importance to Morrison’s novels, especially the Pulitzer-winning Beloved, bringing about a cluster of essays published in various academic journals.
In terms of artistic creation, Xi Chuanjin’s article in Foreign Literature Studies (1997) interprets Beloved from the perspective of magic realism. Zhang Ruwen and Zhou Qun’s essay in Foreign Languages and Their Teaching (2005), by analyzing vocabulary, grammar and rhetoric devices, shows how Toni Morrison makes use of the relationships between language and power to create the two main discourses in the confusion of time and space of Beloved (Zhang Ruwen & Zhou Qun, 2005: 28). In 1993, Luo Xuanmin’s critical article entitled “Absurd Rationality and Rational Absurdity: On the Critical Consciousness of Toni Morrison’s Beloved” addresses motherhood, exploring Morrison’s critique of traditional attitudes towards motherhood as both confining and destructive and illustrating her humanist concerns in the novel. (Luo Xuanmin, 1993: 64-65)
Regarding narrative structure, Weng Lehong publishes her paper in Foreign Literature Review (1999), which reveals that Morrison endows Beloved with complex characteristics ranging from man and ghost, tradition and reality to spirit and material. These characteristics not only contribute to Beloved as a pivotal character in the narrative development of the whole novel, but also become a narrative strategy of Morrison’s novel creation. (Weng Lehong, 1999: 65-72) Wang Lili’s essay in Journal of South-Central University for Nationalities (Humanities and Social Sciences) (2004), based on narratology, does research on the inner relationships between central narration and marginal narration in Beloved and shows Morrison’s feminine writing brings a new meaning to literature.
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Chapter 2 Theoretical Framework—New Historicism
2.1 Background of New Historicism
New Historicism was first put forward in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Before it boomed, most of the major literary theories in the 20th century adhered to the literary ontology and viewed literature as a self-contained field that was independent of historical politics. For example, Russian formalism, which was born in the early 20th century, raised the banner of “literariness” and opposed “regarding art works as the window of the world” (Hawkes, 1987: 148). New Criticism, prevailing in Europe and America after the Second World War, proposed overcoming “intentional fallacy” and “affective fallacy”, and breaking up the relationship between literature and such external factors as author’s intentions and readers’ feelings so as to concentrate on the study of literary texts. In the new era of structuralism in the 1950s and 1960s, the structuralists were committed to examining the structural model of texts and laid little emphasis on exploring the links between literature, society and history. With structuralism springing up, critics even argued that there was nothing beyond the text, and the text itself was nothing more than an endless symbolic game. It was not concerned with its ultimate meaning, let alone the connection with culture and politics.
It is because New Historicism focuses on associating a literary text with its historical context that it is distinctly different from New Criticism, structuralism and other literary theories. However, it is not a unique way for New Historicism to take the historical context into account while studying literature. As early as the 19th century, Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, a French critic, clearly pointed out that literary creation, not isolated, is subject to the three main aspects of which Taine called race, milieu, and moment. He held that “in order to understand a piece of art, an artist or a group of artists, it is important to think about the spirits and customs of their time. This is the final interpretation of the artwork and the basic reason for everything” (Taine, 1998: 46). Also, Northrop Frye once declared that literature is located in the humanities; history is on one side, and philosophy is on the other. Because literature itself is not a systematic knowledge structure, so critics must find events from conceptual framework of historians, and find ideas from the conceptual framework of philosophers. (Frye, 2009: 12) This actually tells us that historical research has been done before and it is the most basic method of literary research.
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2.2 Development of New Historicism
The second half of the twentieth century witnessed different voices in American literary criticism. In 1980, Stephen Greenblatt, an American professor at the University of California, Berkeley, published Renaissance Self-fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (1988), an influential work in literary criticism. He advocated “cultural or anthropological criticism” (Greenblatt, 1980: 4) in this book. Obviously, Greenblatt is the main representative of New Historicism. Meanwhile, Louis Adrian Montrose, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, is an active supporter of New Historicism and practices the theory in a fuller way. In the same year, he also published “Elise, Queen of Shepherds” and the Pastoral of Power, in which he pointed out that during the reign of Elizabeth I, pastoral poetry had the ideological function of regulating social class relations. In 1982, the term New Historicism was coined by Greenblatt when he “collected a bunch of essays and then, out of a kind of desperation to get the introduction done, I wrote that the essays represented something I called a ‘new historicism’” (Greenblatt, 2007: 197). Greenblatt argued that those essays in Genre showed the critics tended to juxtapose literature and history and challenge the hypothesis which made an absolute division between artistic production and other social production. (Greenblatt, 1982: 6) In February of 1983, the journal Representations was set up, providing a platform for the critics advocating examining literature in its historical and cultural context. Just a few years later, this new school of literary criticism of which Greenblatt called New Historicism, was boomed and considered as “the latest and most valuable literary criticism to our students (and our culture)” (Graff, 1985: 197). It quickly replaced structuralism and was popular with American literary critics.
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Chapter 3 Historical Restoration and Reconstruction ........................ 17
3.1 Rewriting Margaret Garner’s Case ................................ 17
3.2 Representations of the Southern Plantation ........................... 20
3.3 Reflections on the Middle Passage ........................... 24
Chapter 4 Historical Trauma and Reconstruction of the Haunting Memory.......... 27
4.1 Sethe’s Haunting Memories ................................... 27
4.2 Memories in Paul D’s Tobacco Tin ................................. 30
4.3 Memories in Baby Suggs’ Preaching .................. 32
Chapter 5 Historical Consciousness ........................... 36
5.1 Reconstruction of Black Discourse Power .......................... 36
5.2 Reconstruction of Black Identity ................................ 39
5.3 Quest for Restoration of Black Culture ............................ 41
Chapter 5 Historical Consciousness
5.1 Reconstruction of Black Discourse Power
In the mid-1980s, Montrose’s ideas transformed into his late-stage literature view. He changed from an objectivist to a historical relativist and stressed the subjective initiative and the relativity of the meaning of events. In his eyes, culture is more autonomous in the process of reflecting itself, and is more flexible in the way of reflections and production relationships. Literature always has social functions that are dynamic in certain aspects, participating in the circulation and establishment of dominant ideology, or changing and challenging the dominant ideological discourse of power to represent marginal voices. But in addition to these effects, literature also needs to produce or reproduce a new kind of cultural consciousness, a more real voice of discourse, and to attach greater importance to the interpretive and guiding role of the subject spirit in history. (Wang Yuechuan, 1999: 177) Through Beloved, it can be found that the black slaves are always fighting for discourse power, which shows the hope of the black people.
The black slaves are deprived of all human rights because of slavery discourse power. It is a common thing that their families are separated from each other. Worse still, regarded as animals, they can be bought and sold at any time, and they have no discourse power in a society where slavery discourse dominates. In Beloved, when Paul D remembered his partners at Sweet Home, he said, “One crazy, one sold, one missing, one burnt and me licking iron with my hands crossed behind me.” (Morrison, 1987: 72) Apparently, “the sold one never returned, the lost one never found.” (Morrison, 1987: 125). Being muzzled, Paul D was deprived of the right to use language. Besides Paul D, another character in the novel, Sixo, had a language contest with schoolteacher for stealing that shoat.
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Conclusion
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