从《宠儿》透视美国黑人女性的悲剧与成长

Abstract
Toni Morrison is the only Afro-American woman writer who wins the Nobel Prize for literature, and her works are well-known for vivid images, copious emotions and profound thoughts. Her works are always presented on behalf of the black women and full of tragedies. A general theme goes through all her fictions: the tragic life of the black people and the conflict between the white culture and the black culture.
In Beloved, Morrison tells people a story about a black slave woman who has a tragic life but never gives up her faith in self-growth. Through the different growing experiences of three generations, the fiction reveals the humble position of the black women and their difficult process of growth under the oppression of racism and sexism. On the one hand Morrison shows the real situation of the black women from a distinct point of view, and demonstrates their pains and sufferings. On the other hand, through the tragic story of Beloved, Morrison also shows people the great strength and self-growth of the black women. Although the growing process is full of difficulties, the black women, through the efforts of generations, finally build themselves up, and bravely face the present and the future.

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A. The Tragedy of the Black Women
Morrison chooses the 124 house on Bluestone Road in Cincinnati as the scene of the story. The time is 1873. Although it was 18 years ago when she escaped from the Sweet Home and killed her daughter. It was still a strong memory in Sethe’s mind. At the beginning of the fiction, it said that “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.” But “by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims.” (Morrison 3). The baby ghost was always in the house. It speeded the Grandmother’s death, and made the little daughter Denver eccentric. The whole story begins with a mysterious ambience, and it is even like a ghost story. In Morrison’s mind, brutal act from human being is crueler than slavery itself, so she bitterly attacks it and describes the real situation of black slaves in the world:

White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. The more colored people spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.  (Morrison 198)
In Beloved, the schoolteacher is a typical white man; he seems to be impartial and objective. But what he and his nephews did was really brutal: in order to do so-called research, he used to gauge the black slaves, like the draught animals. One of the nephews had nursed Sethe while his brother held her down. The white people do good or evil things just as they like, and the black people have no choices, but receive all. With the coming of the modern society, the scientific and democratic spirit has been put around the United States, but never the Africa-Americans. The ghosts of the black slaves are the irrefutable evidence. Morrison once said, her works are for the black people themselves. The black people should love themselves; especially the black women need do so.

   In Beloved, Sethe has to kill her daughter, and undoubtedly that’s a big tragedy. Besides, Beloved herself is a tragedy too. She comes to this world at a wrong time, and is killed by her mother. When she comes back, she is treated as an evil. At the end of the Beloved, Morrison writes:
Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they know her name? Although she has claim, she id not claimed. In the pl