earticle

영어

This paper aims to examine black male and female characters and their vulnerable gender relationship between opposite sexes in Toni Morrison’s novel Sula by reviewing phases of their social, racial, gender, and economic status at the beginning of the twentieth century in Jim Crow America, and provide contextual and circumstantial understanding for black male characters. While many of black male characters of Morrison seem to fail to show strong and promising black role model in a family, I would first contextualize this gender/race failure in the larger frame of American society that did not allow black men to perform as a man. Morrison’s many man-woman relationships depicted in the novel would give a clue why black men are considered irresponsible, vulnerable and violent in Morrison criticism. The devastated black men in Morrison’s novels fail to provide a positive vision because of harsh racial discrimination in white-centered American society. In the main section of this essay, I would attempt to connect social emasculation resulting from discriminatory racial segregation and their failing relationships in a black community, the Bottom. As “black” and as “man,” the Bottom’s men are vulnerable for they cannot properly perform their masculine roles in their own black community. Even if they try to express their manhood by marrying a black woman and pursuing a job, their attempt fails and only serves to confirm the inferiority that the society imposes on them. Through these analyses, this paper aims to focus upon the complex, problematic status of black male characters in Morrison’s novel by analyzing major black couples who fails to communicate each other, start a family, and maintain it. By doing so, black people’s domestic problems, which once seem to be inherent in a personal sphere of insecurity, irresponsibility, incompetence, and lacks, are closely related to and derived from the white-centered society.