Abstract:

Beloved is the well-known novel written by the American black female writer Toni Morrison. It mainly tells that a black female slave Sethe killed her daughter in order to save her from slavery. But the ghost of her daughter comes back to punish mother’s behavior ceaselessly. This novel shows that whether in history or in reality, black female may be the group which was oppressed deepest and suffered from both the racial discrimination and the gender oppression. This paper is to analyze four main female characters in this novel: Beloved, Sethe, Denver and Baby Suggs so as to reveal the seeking of identity by black female and the exploration of the way out for black female by Morrison.

Key words: Beloved, Toni Morrison, female characters

摘要:

《宠儿》是美国黑人女作家托尼•莫里森的代表作，主要讲述了女黑奴塞丝为了使幼女逃离做奴隶的悲惨命运而杀死了她，但女婴还魂归来，并不停惩罚母亲当年的行为。该小说揭露了无论在历史还是现实中，黑人女性也许是受奴隶制压迫最深的一个群体，长期遭受种族歧视和性别压迫双重摧残。本文将通过分析《宠儿》中的四个女主人公：宠儿、塞丝、丹芙和贝比•萨格斯来揭示黑人女性对身份的寻求，以及莫里森对黑人女性出路的探索。

关键词：《宠儿》， 托尼•莫里森， 女性角色

1. Introduction
1.1    An Introduction to Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison was born on February 18, 1931 and spent the first years of her life in Ohio. She achieved a bachelor’s degree in English when she studied in Howard University, and then she completed a master’s degree of Arts at Cornell. After being an academic English Professor at Howard, Morrison became an editor at Random House, where she was mainly responsible for the editorial work of black fiction. Meanwhile, she started writing a series of creative works. In 1993, those works made her the first African American woman to achieve the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1970, her novel The Bluest Eye was published. Her novel Sula in 1974 won Morrison a nomination for the National Book Award. In 1977, Morrison won the National Book Critics Circle Award with her novel Song of Solomon. Her other works comprise Tar Baby in 1981, Jazz in 1992, Paradise in 1998, and, of course, Beloved. That novel Beloved, recognized as her best, won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Today, Morrison is to serve as the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University, where she conducts undergraduate workshops in creative writing.