Opening New Doors : A Feminist perspective of Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Pages:208-209
Neeraj (Department of English, BPSU, Khanpur Kalan, Sonepat, Haryana)

Feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights for women. This includes seeking to establish equal opportunities for women in education and employment. A feminist advocates or supports the rights and equality of women. The words “feminism” and “feminist’ first appeared in France and the Netherlands in 1872, Great Britain in the 1890s, and the United States in 1910. The present paper analyses Toni Morrison’s Feminist project in Beloved. It explores feminist consciousness in the social content of the novel and the mode through which the writer expresses her message. In order to do this, the study embarks on a critical review of Morrison’s artistic works, including, Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1988) and Paradise (1997). A review of critical works on Morrison has also been done and this highlights Beloved as the richest of all Morrison’s novels in terms of social concerns and style, for a feminist review This has been proved in our analysis of how she expresses the emergence of the modem African- American woman. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1988, while Morrison as a writer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, and this enhanced the interest in choosing this novel for the research. A review of other critical material detailing African American history and the experience of slavery has enabled the contextualization of Beloved within the historical epoch it belongs to. The liberal feminist framework has been utilized to advance the gender analysis of the social relations in the texts. In addition, the sociological framework has been identified as central to the analysis due to its focus on society. Thus a socio-feminist perspective has been taken as the orientation of the study. Our research realizes that Morrison has a feminist agenda for her society, as revealed through her Social and stylistic concerns. Through her thematic concerns, she points out the era of slavery as a key point in time when the lives of black women were interrupted and patriarchy subjugated them. The study notes with interest the foregrounding of the female characters as principal actors in the liberation process. They have taken up the important role of being her mouthpieces. At the same time, she has utilized her stylistic strength, where through the process of active ‘rememory’, the characters recreate their past through dialogue. This has offered the female characters, and by extension African- American women, a discursive space, where they are able to express their view on the past and present.