Abstract
This thesis seeks a fresh perspective on Toni Morrison's Beloved and Jazz by examining the double crux of race and gender within the context of psychoanalysis. The study investigates mainly the psychological toll and subversion inflicted upon the black characters, especially the female self in the white American racist and patriarchal society. It examines the racialized black woman's denied subjectivity and how she is viewed as property (when schoolteacher and his nephews appropriate Sethe's body) or worse as a breeder with no rights to keep her children under slaver's system. In fact, unlike a traditional hero of fugitive narratives, Toni Morrison's heroines seek different ways to achieve psychic wholeness through reconnection to the lost mother. The objectifying ideology, which is adopted by the white master to justify his savagery and mistreatment, leads the black woman to rebel unapologetically to claim her sense of self. By portraying the struggle for self-affirmation and the battle for subjectivity, Morrison intimates the psychic journey and various paths taken by these degraded and oppressed women to selfactualization. Toni Morrison creates characters that counter the mythologized black mammy. Sethe, the strong phallic woman, rebels against the image of slave motherhood as defined by white patriarchal norms
