Abstract

Toni Morrison is a great African-American writer who is deeply concerned with the experience and mental process of black people, especially black women under double discriminations. Her extraordinary writing skills and deep insights win great reputation for her and she contributes outstanding works to the literary world such as The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved.

This paper aims to analyze the metaphors of the novel Beloved from the perspective of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) put forward by Lakoff &Johnson and Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) by Fauconnier & Turner with the focus on the cognitive function of metaphors, thus offering an exploration of its deep themes and dense implications.

The article is composed of four parts. The first part gives a brief introduction to Toni Morrison and her novel Beloved. The second part introduces the theories of CMT and CBT. The third part decodes the governing images of the novel and analyzes the metaphorical interpretations. Closely interrelated with each other, these metaphors form a semantic network to reveal the “huge iceberg” behind it, thus providing a better understanding of the novel and a new perspective of the study of Toni Morrison.

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