Abstract:

Toni Morrison, one of the most famous and splendid black writers in American Literature, won the 1993 Nobel Prize Winner of Literature. Maternal love is an invariable and profound theme in Toni Morrison’s works. In her classic novel Beloved, Morrison keeps a watchful eye on the protagonist, Sethe,to express a black slave mother’s miserable experience, and twisted love under control of the slave owner.This thesis mainly analyzes the novel from the perspective of maternal love, studies the primary characters and their twisted maternal love, and looks for the concrete details of the constant theme, in order to highlight the unique feature of Morrison’s maternal love. Meanwhile, this thesis aims to offer readers a new way to fully understand the theme of Morrison’s fictions.

Keywords:  Beloved;  maternal love; twisted; the slavery system

摘  要：

托尼•莫里森，一九九三年诺贝尔文学奖得主，是当代美国文学史上最著名、最杰出的黑人作家之一。母爱是托尼•莫里森作品中不变且深刻的主题。其经典之作《宠儿》一书中，莫里森着重描写了女主角赛思，借以表现在奴隶主的控制下一位黑人母亲的悲惨经历和被扭曲的爱。本文试图从母爱的角度深入解读《宠儿》，研究小说中的主要角色以及她们所表现的扭曲的母爱。寻找文中主题的具体体现，解读其中的深刻内涵，以突出莫里森诠释母爱的独特，为广大读者理解托尼•莫里森的小说提供了一个新的渠道。

关键词： 宠儿；母爱；畸形；奴隶制

1. Introduction
1.1 Toni Morrison and Her Works
“Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature.”
                                    —The New York Review of Books
Toni Morrison(1921- ), as the first black female writer who wins the Nobel Prize of Literature, is frequently mentioned for her great achievement in the history of American literature, especially black female literature.Morrison mainly focuses her attention on the lives and history of the African American and shows us the complicated world of those miserable people, especially those black female.
She has a large number of fictions include The Bluest Eye(1967), Sula(1973), Song of Solomon(1977), Tar Baby(1981), Beloved(1987), Jazz(1992) and all that. Beloved, one of Morrison’s best novels, published in 1987 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, focus on the maternal love and its distortion and loss. The publishment of this novel shocked the whole American literary because Morrison used unique way to show a black slave mother’s apparently crazy love for her little children. A large number of scholars are attracted to the controversial theme study. Kimberly Chabot Davis states that, ”Thematically, the emphasis of Beloved shifts from external factors that create fragmentation toward internal healing process that allows for psychic integration and the novel chronicles this healing process, which, the character leaned must be based on love.”