Beyond womanist discourse : speaking the unspeakable in Toni Morrison's novels

• Main Author: Lim, Dora Shi Jia
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/62138
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This thesis seeks to investigate the question of how Toni Morrison, through her two creative works The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973) , reflect and exceed the theoretical concepts of Womanism and Feminism in closely rendering her heroines’ experiences and processes of self-realization. As Nana Wilson-Tagoe explains, womanist discourse rises out of black women’s realization that their specific needs, collective knowledge, and means of empowerment are not encompassed in mainstream feminism. The term ‘womanist’ is first coined by Alice Walker, who establishes womanism from experiences firmly rooted in African American women’s culture. These two books of Morrison’s that will be discussed are representative texts illustrating how she both adopts and challenges Walker’s womanist ideologies. In Morrison’s depiction of her two central protagonists’ growth and development, and through their journeys toward empowerment and the failed womanist quests that they undergo, the characters in both novels represent different stances of Walker’s womanist ideals. But by centering the narratives of those who live on the margins, Morrison’s fiction go beyond talking about any fixed theory; she brings marginalized black females to the middle of the story and lends visibility to their painful realities often rendered invisible in history texts and mainstream media.