The Gaze of the Other in Beloved: Intertextuality, Inequality, and Inspection

Abstract

Centering on the resurrection of a female African American baby, Toni Morrison’s Beloved displays the ineluctable impossibility of the blacks’ identity construction and simultaneously renders her own idea about their suffering in practice. For the inevitability and her ideology, both are illustrated through gazes, which take place among the characters and elucidate her own consciousness. Based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Michel Foucault’s gaze theories, not only the complicated gazes within the fiction are explicated to illuminate their socially classified torment in the hierarchical marginalization, but those outside the context are also intertextually associated and deployed to raise more moral care in the mainstream western culture. Though concurrently intertwined, the former overwhelms the latter, inducing the dilemma in which African Americans are trapped on the fringe of the society and adding up to the tragical narrative where Morrison bespeaks the lingering impacts of slavery and the necessity of their own blackness.