토니 모리슨의 『그 아이에게 신의 가호가 있기를』 에 나타난 흑인여성의 정체성 박탈과 회복의 과정

Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child: Dispossession and Recovery of African American Identity

Toni Morrison’s latest novel God Help the Child retells how African Americans suffered from double consciousness over generations and how they react to it. The prior generations, like Sweetness in the novel, learned to admit the dispossessed black identity and abused their children in order to accept their inferiority. However, Bride in the twenty-first century manages to commodify her black skin as a symbol of beauty to achieve social position and wealth, thereby partially traversing the persistent concept of black ugliness. However, her performance of race still fails to fully recover her sense of being that was once dispossessed by discrimination and abandonment. When Bride confronts another abandonment by her boyfriend, her body is transformed into a little black girl which ironically gives her the opportunity to develop interdependent and caring relationships with other abused victims. Through the novel, Morrison asks for communal responsibilities to build interdependence to resist dispossession and discrimination under the oppressing culture both in individual and on a communal level.