Abstract

Toni Morrison is a famous contemporary African-American woman writer. She was conferred the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, and she is the first black female writer to enjoy the honor. Morrison insists on claiming herself as “African-American female writer”, and always uses her unique way to search for the history and reality of American blacks. She hopes the combination of history and reality can help the black people recognize the source of misery and build their own identity and live a new life.

Morrison published Beloved in 1987. This book is based on a historical event. Through telling of an infanticide case, it reveals the horrible crimes committed against black people by slavery. Beloved won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize and is generally regarded as a milestone in American literary history. At present, overseas studies on Beloved are rich, while domestic studies mainly focus on the theme of the novel and its narrative strategies and other writing techniques. Based on the theory of post-colonialism and feminism, this thesis will make an analysis of “identity” and “identity building” embodied in Beloved.

This thesis consists of four parts: the first part is a brief introduction to Toni Morrison and Beloved, and then it offers some present studies on Toni Morrison and Beloved both at home and abroad, which further points to the aims and significance of the thesis. The second part is a brief introduction to post-colonialism, feminism and Morrison’s view of identity and identity-building in her works. The third part discusses the main subject—“identity-building” which is revealed through characterization in the novel.

According to the analysis, this thesis comes to a conclusion that Beloved not only reflects how the characters persecuted by slavery struggle to appropriate their own spaces and to build their own identity, but also proves that Toni Morrison, as a female intellectual, has showed her concern for “identity-building”. All of these analyses will help us get a better understanding of Toni Morrison and the situation of contemporary African-American females.

Key words: identity, identity-building, Beloved, Toni Morrison