Ghosts of the past in American ethnic womens novels

Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston by haunting the American literary canon with their prolific writings have finally succeeded to take their place in the American literary canon as active participants in the canon of African-American literature and Chinese-American literature. They gained their reputation as leading African and Chinese women writers. Their novels have been a mirror image in exposing the complexities that have surrounded African and Chinese life, and a bridge between the past African life and past Chinese life, and the present life in America. Morrison is generally regarded as one of the most significant African-American novelists to have emerged in the 1970's. Moreover, she is praised for her use of language and her sense of voice that emerged not only in her dialogue but also in the movement of her narratives. Morrison's novels are also remarkable for their sense of place, for the detailed, coherent physical worlds she creates. Finally, her fiction is noteworthy for its depiction of deep psychic realities of women's experience. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993 for her fifth novel Beloved. In Beloved, Morrison confronts directly for the first time the institution of slavery. Morrison's intention is immediately apparent in her novel's dedication to the "Sixty Million and more" victims of slavery. Spanning the period from 1855 to 1874, Beloved is at one level a powerful account of slave experiences, an intimate re creation of suffering and struggle. In this novel, Morrison has created a lyrical, mythic and haunting narrative atmosphere. At the heart of Beloved is a single terrible act: Sethe, a young slave, who kills her not yet two-year-old daughter. Much of the novel is devoted to making that act of murder comprehensible, not as instance of insane cruelty but image of the legacy of slavery. This act sort of becomes clear when Sethe's murdered daughter, Beloved, appears as a young woman eighteen years after her death. This addition of the ghost daughter becomes significant for the body of the work. This ghost daughter makes the other characters confront with the past so that they can understand the present. In other words, Morrison in the figure of Beloved sends a message to the new generation; coming to terms with the past will help them to understand the present and shape their future. The "ghosts of the past" enabled her to pass her message from generation to generation IXMaxine Hong Kingston by bringing the country's attention to her novels achievement, has become a leading Chinese woman writer in the middle of the 1970's, Kingston helped initiate a literary movement to reclaim Chinese Americans' sense of history and identity by representing the "mis-represented" and by giving voice to the "voiceless." Kingston's writing style, use of language, and thematic preoccupations have not only strongly influenced the development of Chinese American literature but also enriched the spectrum of American literature because they were among the works of the ethnic women writers who haunted the American literary canon. Kingston's first autobiographical novel, The Woman Warrior represented the descriptions of Chinese characters, and their struggle to reclaim their sense of history and identity through the study. Throughout the novel, memories, talk-stories, and traditional Chinese legends were used to interweave the past and the present, fact and fiction, reality and imagination, and traditional Chinese and modern American culture. The female narrator who is a second generation Chinese-American in The Woman Warrior is left between two cultures. Therefore, throughout the novel the narrator goes and comes between these two cultures. The book, because of this duaffty narrates different stories; on one level there is the description of the narrator's close relation with her mother and ghost aunt, and on the other hand there is the narration of the story of the girl growing up among ghosts and her search for voice and identity. The narrator's search for voice and identity were possible by confronting the past. The narrator learned the importance of human dignity and gained true identity through her mother's talk-story