母女關係中的愛與暴力: 童妮．摩里森的《寵兒》與《蘇拉》

Abstract

此篇論文探討童妮．摩里森的兩本小說《寵兒》與《蘇拉》，討論種族、性別、階級剝削等等制度如何影響黑人家庭生活以及黑人母女間的親密關係。論文分為四部分。第一部份討論黑人理論家在母女關係方面的相關論述，以及黑人理論家對白人母女關係理論的部分修正。第二部分討論《寵兒》，強調奴隸制度如何抹滅黑人女性的主體性，以及奴隸制度如何造成黑人母女之間過於強烈的愛與不可避免的衝突。第三部分討論《蘇拉》，討論書中多種不同的母女關係、不同的母系家族，以及背後的性別、種族政治。最後一部分為結語，比較《寵兒》與《蘇拉》中兩位謀殺親兒的黑人母親。

This paper focuses on Morrison's two novels, Beloved and Sula, exploring how the interlocking system of racism, sexism and class exploitation dominate the circumstances of black families and determine the working of intimate mother-daughter relationships. The whole paper is divided into four sections. Chapter One talks about the interactions between white and black feminists on the issue of mother-daughter relationships and emphasizes black feminists' contributions to the studies of womanhood. Lots of black theories on mother-daughter relationships would be discussed in this part. Chapter Two focuses on Beloved. Beloved delineates the problematic subjectivity of black women caused by slavery and historicizes slavery as the origin of the love-violence complex in African-American mother-daughter relationships. In this novel, Morrison portrays a house/ a race haunted by the ghost of past and the infanticidal mother’s guilt and love. Through the trope of rememory, Morrison seeks to write a compelling elegy, especially on the pain and loss in the black matrilineal genealogy. Chapter Three studies Sula, foregrounding the tension between the traditional, stable versus the rebellious, marginal notions of black womanhood and personhood within black community. In Sula, Morrison describes how the black community’s concepts of black womanhood are intertwined with a reaction against the racialized gender politics of slavery, and she uses two opposite female characters/ matrilineal families to illustrate the diversity of black mother-daughter relationships under the influence of slavery, racism and sexism. At the end of the thesis is the Conclusion Part, where I would make a brief comparison between the two novels, summarizing how the issues of race, gender, and representation are closely related to the discussion of mother-daughter relationships in Beloved and Sula.