토니 모리슨의 『그 아이를 도우소서』에 나타난 잃어버린 육체와 주조된 욕망

Lost Body and Coined Desire Represented in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child

In her latest novel, God Help the Child, Toni Morrison points out readers must confront Bride’s traumatic events with problems related to their own selves, meaning that we all live in a broader cultural dialogue, modernity. In terms of modernity, this paper attempts to discover whether the protagonist Bride’s alienation proceeded from signal images within advertisements and the media ever-present in daily lives, resulting in the loss of her real body and her own desire. For Deleuze, only bodies have depth and actual existence and thus are dynamic and self-causing, while desire is caused by bodies. So, this paper tries to define such a loss as a source of alienation from self and others by adopting Deleuze’s key concepts, the structure of Oedipal desire-production. From this vantage point this paper argues that Bride’s bodily deformation into a young girl stems from the process of searching for her own self and world through encountering other people and their stories. By considering Bride’s bodily change as aesthetic fantasy, I try to draw a parallel between the concepts of Morrison’s rememory and Deleuze’s becoming. In this regard, I highlight the correlation between Bride’s bodily change and Deleuze’s affection as well as a mixture of multiple stories in Morrison and an interaction among selves in Deleuze. Thus, the forces of narratives and new time emerge in Bride’s body just like Deleuze’s maps in every relation from one point to another.