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Abstract
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This research aims at studying the ambivalent factors, such as single mothers, suppressed mothers, racism, beauty standards, subjugation, economic deprivations, and their after-effects on the lives of black mothers who restrain from nurturing their children as ordinary human beings. In order to scrutinize all these factors, three novels of the black writer, Toni Morrison, namely The Bluest Eye (1970), Beloved (1987), and God Help the Child (2015) have been selected. Drawing upon Nancy Chodorow’s Psychoanalytic, Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist, and Adrienne Rich’s Feminist perspectives, the researcher argues that the experience of motherhood, especially mother-daughter relationship gets intricately ambivalent due to the external factors, such as: slavery, racism, economy, sexism, and single female-parenting. Due to these factors, mothers displace violence on their children in the form of child abuse, emotional neglect, and lack of nurture. Motherhood is an intricate state in which black mothers oscillate between blending feelings of love and hatred towards their children under the dominance of the patriarchy. The novels have been selected due to some resemblances that exist in portraying black mothers who experience the similar racial conflicts, such as the racialized beauty, the structural racism, the internalized racism: self-hatred, and their complexities for the sake of self-discovery within the realm of white patriarchy. The research findings indicate that factors, such as colorism, sexism, racism, discrimination, and economic marginalization still exist in the American society and the black mother has to entirely endure the racial issues by her own as she used to suffer from breast-feeding to nurturance. These elements place the African American, including the colored people, at disadvantage portraying the failure and unfulfillment of ideal American Dream for them.
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