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Violence In Morrison's O Mother, Where Art Thou?

794 Words4 Pages

Actually, what Morrison has called “Paradise” is quite a misleading concept to the readers’ expectations. P. Fultz contends that “The nature of Morrison’s paradise must be interrogated” (38).Morrison thus subverts the conventional connotations that the title carries since the first lines of the novel illustrate the destruction of thisparadise,"They shoot the white girl first. With the rest, they can take their time”(3). The next pages of Morrison’s novel bring to light the reasons that have sparked the above violent scene. As a matter of fact, many studies have been conducted on the struggle between Ruby’s men and the Convent women and theensuing violence and fierce actions towards the women. In this chapter, I am going to explore the …show more content…

An Irigarian Reading of The Book of Chronicles, Julia Kelso investigates the child’s immersionwithin the father’s realm. She asserts that “For Lacan, within patriarchal order it is the father’s name(nom) and prohibition(non) against the desire of the mother, in both senses of the genitive, that carvesout a symbolic place for both the male and the female child” (37). In Morrison’s novel, the female characters’ immersion within the patriarchal realm hinders them from reaching an individualization oftheir feminity and their identities as true females. Consequently, their permanent escapism from the men of Ruby society asserts their need for another world where their individualism as females’ is achieved.Thence, the first empowerment tool to be discussed in this section is the women’s act of mirroring that serves a dual purpose as it represents the female characters’ intimate relation with reflection and their powerful of resistance against the patriarchal rigid ideologies.
In her insightful study entitled “Reflections in Contemporary Feminist Literature”, Theodora Hermes provides deep understanding concerning the use of the “Mirrors” and their relations to both females “psychological and physical development. Hermes introduces us to two different types of “Mirrors,” “The physical and the metaphorical one.” In her study, she tries to subvert the ordinary use of the “Mirrors” by emphasizing

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