Significance of the Research

1.1 Significance of the ResearchThis thesis analyzes Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, in which the black woman Sethe kills her daughter by sawing her head with a handsaw, and for this reason years later the little ghost comes back to revenge Sethe.In recent years, scholars have concentrated on analyzing Beloved’s literary features,themes and its contents. Every generation has its own understanding about the novel and its value. This thesis focuses on illustrating Sethe’s resentments against slavery. To a large extent, black women’s psychology, human nature and maternal love are distorted because of the long-term persecution of slavery, such as Sethe, who even kills her daughter. This thesis is digging out the different form and expression of maternal love in the novel Beloved by comparing it with normal maternal love. Under the oppression of cruel slavery and other factors aroused by it, black women have no choice but to do something seeming cruel.1.2 Organization of the PaperThis thesis mainly analyzes the protagonist’s abnormal maternal love and its reasons. After an overall introduction, I will briefly present studies of this novel by scholars coming from home and abroad. The main part focuses on the motherhood of the black woman Sethe, especially stating the reasons of Sethe’s abnormal maternal love, including the cruelty of slavery, lacking of maternal love in her childhood and Schoolteacher’s oppression. At last, a conclusion will be given to terminate the thesis.Chapter 2 Literature ReviewToni Morrison (1931- ) is one of the most famous contemporary black writers. Morrison pays great attention to black people and has written a series of novels concerning black people’s miserable fate. Toni Morrison’s novels are famous for vivid dialogue, special themes and typical characters. In her novels, Morrison profoundly explores the inner world of black people, including love, race, religious belief, alienation, friendship, and betrayal, sex, and even supernatural, especially African American women’s privileged and sensitive observ ation. In her novels, she shows people, language, and society concepts of value, places, politics, and cultural traditions that have influenced African American people as well as herself.In 1993, Morrison won Nobel Prize for Literature. As the first African American who reached the honor, she has gained reputation all over the world and has been famous as one of the major figures in American national literature.Beloved is published in 1987 and is viewed as Morrison’s best novel. The heroine of this novel is Sethe, who fled from the Sweet Home----the plantation in Kentucky. While a posse arrives in Ohio and tries to capture her back, she kills her daughter and tries to kill the other three children. Filled with suspense and bitter poetry, Beloved is an extraordinary achievement. Glaring at the abyss of slavery, this excellent novel portrays history in the form of a story, which is as meaningful as Exodus and as smooth as a lullaby.After publishing, this novel has gained a critical success. It won the many prizes. Moreover, it has been adapted into film in 1998. Nowadays, the literary world still has a high praise for this novel, for example, Chicago Sun-Time once regarded Beloved as Toni Morrison’s best work and that this novel excellently displays her prodigious.Los Angeles Times considered “it is even deemed to be such a masterwork that I can’t imagine American literature can without it”.However, there still are some controversial about the novel. On the one hand, critics consider it is melodramatic even self-indulgent to some extent. On the other hand, admirers of the novel say these criticisms fail to appreciate Morrison’s imaginative risks ar e necessitated in her magnitude topic. Based on so much argumentation, scholars from home and abroad are increasingly more. Consequently, I would like to illustrate a few of them as follows.To begin with, domestic scholars also attach much attention to this novel. Qi Jixiang, an instructor in Hebei Foreign Language Professional School, published an article on the interpretation of Beloved’sidentity. Xie Juan’s Memory, Storytelling and Survival in Beloved focuses on discussing the battered survivors of slavery and their offspring who grow up in the shadow. Another Chinese scholar, Jiang Jiuhong studies the contradiction between maternal love and self-construction as well as the Lacanian psychoanalysis of Beloved. Based on Lacan’s theory of three-dimensional world, she analyzed the psychological activities of Sethe when she killed her child and how did Sethe overcome her psychogenic disorder. Wang Xiaogang and Huang Zhen interpreted the multiple identities of Beloved and claimed that the diversity and openness of Beloved’s identity was naturally showed under the influence of postmodernism.When it comes to overseas scholars, studies on the novel are more diversified. Take Tadd Ruetenik, an instructor in philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, for instance, wrote a thesis named Animal Liberation o r Human Redemption: Racism and Specialism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. He abstracted:Toni Morrison's Beloved is a morally sophisticated slave narrative that (among many otherthings) deals with the topic of racism in American historical consciousness. It also implicitlyaddresses the issue of specialism. Morrison’s novel is a poignant example of humanmeliorism, and yet is also a useful illustration of how the issue of human well-being cannotbe cleanly separated from consideration of animal exploitation. To be sure, Beloved doeslittle to promote the interests of exploited animals, focusing instead on exploited humans.Morrison’s masterpiece seems to justify animal exploitation as a condition for the liberationof human slaves (22).Besides, Lars Eckst ein’s A love supreme: jazz-thetic strategies in Toni Morrison's Beloved pays attention to the importance of music, not only concerning Beloved, but also with regard to the predicament of black Diaspora. Eckstein said: “With regard to Beloved in particular, her musical scope has received little critical attention. While Morrison’s subsequent novel Jazz has been acknowledged and praised for its use of musical technique, Beloved has rarely been read under similar premises (Eckstein 2006).”Chapter 3 Analysis of Maternal Love3.1 Maternal Love in Common SenseLove is not to be constrained in the aridness and simplicity of biology, but is to be left floating delicate and innocent of any material reality. The relationship between a mother and her child is different from other human beings’ relationships because a mother’s love for her child is irreplaceable.。