Identity and resistance in Toni Morrison’s Song Of Solomon, Beloved and Paradise

Abstract

This thesis, on quest for identity and the use of resistance in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Beloved and Paradise, examines the African-American’s search for an authentic self and the various forms of resistance they resort to in their quest. In Song of Solomon, the protagonist, Milkman leaves home in search of gold that would buy him his freedom but rather ends up on a journey in search for his roots; the discovery of which eventually earns him his identity. In Beloved, Sethe, the protagonist, and others had to resist slavery at Sweet Home, the ironically named slave plantation, in search for their freedom and identity and to resist recapture and return to slavery; Sethe had to kill her baby daughter, Beloved. Sethe has to live through a lot of trauma before being redeemed. Again, in the quest for an authentic self, an identity based on racial purity in Paradise, nine 8-rock men from the town of Ruby murder five harmless women in a nearby Convent because they suspect the women of being stumbling blocks in their quest. The thesis shows the extent to which the search for a genuinely moral and cultural identity depends on a revisionary historiography. We cannot really claim ourselves morally or politically until we have reconstructed our individual and collective identities, re-examined our dead and our disremembered. This project is not simply one of adding to one’s ancestral line, it often involves fundamental discoveries about what ancestry is, what continuity consist in, how cultural meanings do not just sustain themselves through history but are in fact materially embodied and fought for.