Abstract Toni Morrison is the first black female winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in history. Most of her works are focusing on black women’s suffering and awakening, racial and sexual discrimination, and the harmony between man and nature. A Mercy tells a story happening at the end of 17th century, in the bud of serfdom, between the north-American farmer Jacob and his mailed wife Rebekka, a young black slave Florens, a native Indian Lina and a mixed-race Sorrow living on the farm. The thesis analyzes A Mercy from the perspective of ecofeminism, focusing on the analysis of the hard life experiences and the self-pursuit of the four female characters after the destruction of the ecological environment, and revealing how men control women and destroy the nature both in patriarchy and in slavery. 66086

Key words: ecofeminism; patriarchy; self-pursuit

摘 要托妮·莫里森是历史上唯一一位获得诺贝尔文学奖的黑人女作家，其多数作品关注黑人妇女经历的苦难与觉醒、性别和种族歧视以及人与自然的和谐。《恩惠》讲述了十七世纪末农奴制刚萌芽时，北美农场主雅各布与他的邮购妻子丽贝卡、年轻黑人女仆弗洛伦斯、印第安人莉娜以及混血女孩索萝在农场里发生的故事。本篇论文将从生态女性zhuyi角度分析《恩惠》，重点解析四位女性人物在生态环境破坏后各自的成长经历和自我追寻的过程，剖析了在父权和奴隶制度下男性对女性的控制及对自然的破坏。

毕业论文关键词：生态女性zhuyi；父权；自我追寻

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2.Literature Review 2

3. A Brief Introduction to Ecofeminism 3

4. An Ecofeminist Analysis of the Female Characters in A Mercy 4

4.1 Before the Destruction of the Ecological Environment--The Female Characters’ Plights in A Mercy 4

4.2 After the Destruction of the Ecological Environment--The Female Characters’ Self-pursuit in A Mercy 8

5. Conclusion 13

Works Cited 15

1. Introduction

Toni Morrison was born in 1931, in Ohio, the daughter of Gorgia-born George Wofford, a shipyard welder, and Alabama-born Ramah Willis Wofford. Morrison attended an integrated school in Lorain and excelled early on, especially in reading. Among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. Before her formal school years, Morrison had absorbed a lot of stories from her parents at home, both of whom were storytellers and musicians and they also instilled in their children deep respects for the black people’s heritage through the stories they told. Morrison graduated from Lorain High School in 1949 and enrolled in Howard University, where she majored in English and minored in classics. During her college school years, she joined a university-affiliated touring repertory company, and changed her name to Toni, because so many people had difficulty in pronouncing Chloe. After graduating from Howard in 1953, Morrison attended Cornell University and earned a master’s degree in English after writing a thesis on William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. 文献综述

Morrison has published nine novels since 1970, and they are: The Bluest Eye(1970), Song of Solomon(1977), Sula(1973), Tar Baby(1981), Beloved(1987), Jazz(1992), Paradise(1999), Love(2003), A Mercy(2008), and Home(2012). She won the Nobel Prize in literature for her excellent performance in 1993, as a first black American in history. Her books are short but highly emotional, and famous for the acute observation of the black’s life in America. These works are based on the black’s life, and the themes are all about black culture, black women’s suffering and awakening, racial and sexual discrimination, and the harmony between man and nature. Though Morrison’s works seem all about the black, but A Mercy uncovers what lies under the surface of slavery in the late 17th century. In the novel the farmer Jacob Vaark, a white man, adopts four abandoned women—one white, one native American and two blacks—all enslaved in some way, trying to maintain their precarious life together on a failing farm.