Essays on Toni Morrison

Motherhood is a sacred act for each woman. It is the most powerful and spiritual component of a woman’s life. Published in 1987, “Beloved” by Toni Morrison depicts heart-wrenching lives of African slaves and explores the mother-child relationship and the experience of black women in an unjust and prejudiced society. “Beloved” was based on the real story of a slave woman called Margaret Garner who killed her own child. This masterpiece emphasizes the barbaric and cruel effects of slavery and oppression of black women in the circumstances of racial inequality and abusive behaviors. They were not allowed to ...

Thesis

Toni Morrison's novel, Home, is an allegory that uses post-Korean war setting to paint a picture of the never-ending human conflicts like war, racism, trauma and manhood. Despite many years as the world’s superpower, America has not yet found a solution for world conflicts. Despite fighting in Korea, where he lost his homes, Frank Money has not yet learned how to be a man, and he thinks of Lotus, where he was grown, as a place worse than any battlefield. The novel is a reflection of a struggle that never ends, no matter how someone, how a country ...

Creative Writing on Toni Morrison’s Novel Song of Salomon Chapter 1 Pages 41-44

A Fairy tale: “A Brown Piece of Paper”. Once upon a time there lived a man whose name was Macon Dead. He was a very unusual man for he named all his children, except for the first-born male, by thumbing at random in the Bible. His wife died giving birth to their daughter and a poor man was confused and devastated by his loss. But a girl needed a name. So broken-hearted father took a Bible, and, as he could not read, chose a group of letters that seemed to him strong and handsome: he imagined that it was ...

There is a great connection between literary text and history. Critics who deal with this issue have provided four answers. Firstly, critics argue that literary texts have no time limitations and they are considered to be the universal history. Secondly, literary texts are produced within historical context but due to their literariness they are separate from this context. Thirdly, different literary texts provide people with the opportunity to understand the time in which these texts are fixed. For instance, realist texts are full of imaginative representations of different historical events and moments. Finally, literary texts are connected with different ...

Final Reflective Portfolio

This paper is a reflection of the skills I have gained in this class. It focuses on four texts and analyses them as indicators of my development as a reader and creator of literary and cultural texts. Three of the analyzed texts were created for this class while the fourth was written for a math class.

Part 1: Texts

The Ultimate Book of Martial Arts Fay Goodman's book entitled The Ultimate Book of Martial Arts is already an entertaining read by itself. However, different parts of the book contain paratextual elements that give it a new meaning and make it a more ...

Toni Morrison uses the literal mode of magical realism in Beloved as a decolonizing agent for the post-colonial context as narrated in the story. Morrison uses both magic and realism to narrate the experiences and life of African Americans during the post-colonial period. It focuses on the experience of ex-slaves trying to rebuild their lives in the United States after being freed from slavery. Morrison also uses the narrative as a way of addressing some of the silent experiences about the African Americans under the slavery of the white man. Sethe, the protagonist in the story is from the ...

Abstract

“Song of Solomon” is the third novel written by Toni Morrison and is a very remarkable and rich piece of fiction. Its power lies not only in the representation of African Americans century but also the author’s insistence on the necessity of healing the alienated and broken protagonist, Milkman Dead. His journey to the recognition of the cultural past can be viewed in the context of the mythic quest, as he follows it, first for gold, and then for knowledge about his ancestry. Significantly, in the novel, the writer employs classical myths, specifically that of Icarus and the ...

Macbeth is a play written by William Shakespeare and The Bluest Eye is a novel written by Toni Morrison. Both Macbeth and The Bluest Eye deal with human nature and its striving to reach the best possible state of existence. The goal of Macbeth and his wife is to gain power at all costs which deprives them of humanity. Pecola also wants to improve her life which is why she wishes to have blue eyes. There is much suffering and fight for power in these texts as well as the age all problem of evil which affects all people. ...

Summary- Tar Baby (Toni Morrison)

The novel Tar Baby, by Toni Morrison, explains the story of the extremely debatable quandary of the racially separated African-Americans in America and the inherent practice of social discrimination inflicted on then due to racial prejudice. The novel uses the character of the Protagonist, Jadine, who faces the communal allegations of betraying her own race because she abandoned her real culture and gave up her racial heritage to pursue her dreams. This reflective summary of the novel focuses on the part (pages 231-275) where Valerian (the white owner of entire household and master of all the blacks) realizes about ...

Literature is the perfect mirror of the world society as the creative artists take resort to their works of art to portray the society and culture. A close scrutiny of the literary works of various authors ranging across time in the history of literature would be helpful in bringing an introspective perspective about the state of women in the society. For the purpose of the scrutiny, one can take into reckoning the short story The Story of an Hour penned by Kate Chopin, the short story, The Chrysanthemums by John Steinbeck, the seminal article by feminist film critic, Laura ...

The novel by Toni Morrison, Tar Baby, is a tale of the disputable plight of racially segregated African Americans and the underlying discrimination based on the racial prejudice and biases. The conflicts presented in the novel are portrayed in the character shades of the protagonist, Jadine, who is charged with an act of racial sedition as she pursued her dreams by abandoning her true culture and racial heritage. The novel uses the polemic viewpoints present in the character of Jadine to delineate the racial prejudice which exists at a different level of interaction within the society. Morrison’s primary ...

Racial identity and the acceptance of different racial culture is important to the understanding of the way person accept and understand each other. For many authors the racial identity of their characters is important to the development of the plot and to the understanding of the characters and their contribution to the plot. Toni Morrison deviates from the conventions of presenting the racial identity of Roberta and Twyla and this adds to the ambiguous nature of the story. Twyla and Roberta are presented throughout the story as different person who had to learn to deal with each other despite ...

Yeager by Tom Wolfe

Summary: ‘Yeager’ by Tom Wolfe is an essay about a wonderful U.S airline pilot named Chuck Yeager. The essay begins with an airline emergency situation in which the airline has had trouble with its controls and its pilot Yeager handles the situation very comically and adeptly. It was hard for the passengers that they were in an emergency situation, judging by the way in which the pilot spoke. These, according to Wolfe’s descriptions, are greatness of Yeager, who with his enthralling Appalachian accent, could move mountains in a very casually seeming way. Yeager had fought during the Second ...

Annie Dillard’s “An American Childhood” is the author’s memoir of her growing up in Pittsburg. The excerpt under consideration dwells on the mother of the family. Dillard relates about some specific features of her mother’s character and on peculiar ways through which Mother would express herself. Dillard gives numerous examples illustrating her mother’s extraordinary ability to call in question everything around, puzzle people she encountered, check all the things she learnt and used. Mother could play a scene in front of some lovers in the park making them quarrel, or she could cheat in cards ...

In, “Rhetorical Silence: “Seventeen Syllables”, “Yoneko’s Earthquake” and the “Legend of Miss Sasagawara”, Cheung talks about the silence of the main characters in the short stories. The silence of the characters is mainly due to their culture- in this instance Japanese culture which teaches both men and women not to show their emotion outwardly but rather suffer in silence. However in all the three short stories the author mentions that there happens a dialogue between the characters through physical actions rather than a verbal communication. Cheung focuses on the physical communication and says that instead of the verbal ...

Tony Morrison, born Chloe Anthony Wofford, is a celebrated African American author. Born in 1931 in Lorain Ohio, she showed a proclivity for literature. Despite this, she studied humanities instead of literature at both Cornell University and Howard University . After this, she began a distinguished academic career, eventually working for Yale, Scribner, and many other distinguished establishments. Eventually she became one of the most memorable writers in American history. When Morrison was born, she was the second of four children. Her parents were working-class minorities; it was likely nobody assumed she was grow up to be one of the ...

Introduction

Gender is one of the themes that Morrison explores in her novel Sula. Gender roles help to create unevenness in terms of the power balance between women and men. This unequal balance of power that is prevalent in the social environment of her characters in Sula ultimately becomes a part of them. The impact of this is that it becomes nestled in the psychological conflicts they encounter and experience. In this novel, these psychological conflicts play out on the sexuality platform. The sexuality of the characters results in the internalization of the unequal balance of power between women and ...

Mental Illness as an Escape from Cruel Society in The Bluest Eye, Tender is the Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Mental illness in literature is often a way to accentuate eccentricities, make a character seem dangerous, or lend a character a greater sense of tragedy. The best examples, however, involve using the specter of mental illness as a way to reflect on the way society oppresses the Other, and how these people can use it to empower themselves and their own sense of agency. This latter example is highlighted in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, F. Scott Fitzgerald’ ...

1. Find one good website—other than Wikipedia—about Toni Morrison or The Bluest Eye. Give us the link and explain why you think the website is useful or interesting. What new information did you learned from the site?

Biography.com provides basic information about Toni Morrison and her career (http://www.biography.com/people/toni-morrison-9415590#synopsis). Their entry includes that Morrison won both the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize fro literature, the two most prominent writing prizes that a novelist can win. The book we are reading now, The Bluest Eye and also Song of Solomon and Beloved are her most popular novels. According to the entry, Morison has also won, “Nearly every book prize possible.”

Her father was a blue-collar welder but had to work, other jobs in order to support his four children. Given the situation of Claudio in The Bluest Eye, ...

The Harlem Renaissance was characterized by a revolution of African American arts. It was mainly influenced by the migration of the African Americans most of which settled in the neighborhood of Harlem in New York. The Harlem Renaissance also influenced many writers who lived outside New York and America at large. Each author developed their unique style of writing focusing on different themes and subjects. The style of an author defines their work. Various authors employ their unique style, themes and their style of narration. Some authors choose to use personal narrative in order to make their audience or their ...

Sula was Toni Morrison’s second novel, and was started in 1970, when second-wave feminists insisted on female solidarity; when labor market demanded women both in the workplace and at home, and when the position of women had not been as polarized by domestic ideology since the Victorian Era. It was a time when feminism ceased to be a middle-class privilege and women from all ethnic backgrounds took up their pens to voice their dissatisfaction. This novel may be considered a product of Morrison’s own curiosity towards female relationships, as she wonders in the Foreword to Sula: “What is friendship between ...

Introduction

African American literature was born at the end of the 18th century, during the period when the African American people were still going through slavery. Slaves were seen to be less than human and not able to study sciences or arts. White Philosophers during this time viewed slaves as inferior including those that wrote The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (Nellie McKay and Henry Louis Gates Jr.) as well as Immanuel Kant and David Hume. The philosophers noted that the African American people, nicknamed as ‘Negroes’ by then were inferior to the white people, and they did not ...

Introduction

Toni Morrison an American novelist who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize for being a winner. She became popular for her novels that have epic themes as well as greatly detailed characters. Tony Morrison has only published “Recitatif”- a short story exploring the way the relationship between Roberta and Twyla is shaped due to their racial difference. The author did not specify which of these girls is white or black (Li-li 812). It is, therefore, important to de-code the racial identity that each of these characters has in order to find out how each race is characterized ...

The Bluest Eye is a novel written by Tony Morrison and published in 1970. It is a story of high dramatic tension which arises a number of questions regarding the social construction of race and gender, the individual quest of each person to find and define the unique characteristics of his/her traits and maintain them without being disorientated, the way a multicultural society works or is supposed to work so that no inequalities exist and respect towards everybody is achieved. The aim of this essay is to present you with the aspects of this story in such a way that the connections it holds ...

Analysis of Home by Toni Morrison

The main character of Home by Toni Morrison is Frank Mooney. Frank is a Korean war verteran, black and suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He has recently left his girlfriend, Lily to return home to Lotus, Georgia where his beloved sister, Cee is apperently very ill and close to dying. The setting of the story is the 1950’s and Frank is travelling across country to get to Cee. Morrison tells the story through all three of the characters point of view. She uses the third person, but we hear the characters’ thoughts. Some of the text is told ...

Thesis Statement 1: Society has a way of punishing people they envy by emphasizing the latter’s weakness and making a ridicule out of that individual only to boost their personal worth. - Claim: When the beautiful and poised Hester Prynne arrived at Boston, she came alone awaiting for the arrival of her husband Roger Chillingworth, however, to everyone’s knowledge. This made the women of Boston threatened by her.

Interpretation: That left the young, beautiful and poised Hester Prynne the interest of men. This grew the displeasure of the women of Boston. - Claim: Many believed that Hester ...

ENGL 2328/HIST 1302

The Depiction of Slaves in Novels and Stories, and its Significance The narratives in novels and stories depict the lives of slaves from erstwhile era in different perspectives. The White Americans presented a fabricated picture of the reality, whereas, the autobiographies and stories from black slaves depicted the true conditions in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The novels and stories about slavery and the depiction of slaves were fairly done by the former slaves and therefore, they made a significant contribution to American literature by provoking debates on racism and social injustice. This research will also examine the significance of ...

Imagination

Mary Oliver published Waste Land: An Elegy in the September – October 2003 issue of Orion magazine. In 2004, soon after publishing Waste Land, she released her book collection, Long life: Essays and Other Writings. Oliver fixes the imagery of how the site used to be as she projects her imagination to explore other potentials. Jamaica Kincaid first published Sowers and Reapers in the New Yorker on January 22, 2001. Although Kincaid is a well known a novelist, she is also a staff writer for the New Yorker who produced many essays examining her personal experiences. In this essay she forces her readers ...

English: What is the relationship between love and duty in Sula, and which one is ultimately privileged?

Sula is a novel by Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison. Morrison wrote the novel in 1973. The novel, set in Ohio, features two girls named Nel and Sula who live contrasting lives. Whereas Nel comes from a stable family that believes in social institutions, Sula comes from a dysfunctional family (Morrison). The social divide between the two girls as well as that of the white farmer and his former slave shows the intricate relationship that exists between love and duty. This novel prompts the question, “do people choose to love each other voluntarily, or does duty compel people to love or ...

"The Lesson" by Toni Cade Bambara is a story narrated from the first person perspective. Published in the year 1972, the events that unfold in the story play a crucial role in explaining the differences that existed in the society at that time. The narrative is by Sylvia, a black girl who was young and poor and who lived in the streets of Harlem. The time-frame within which the events were unfolding is unspecified, as the narrator reveals it was ‘back in the days’ (Cookson et al. 78). A local woman, Miss Moore, was the only person educated in that society. Because ...

The realities of slavery run throughout Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Two aspects of those realities are particularly striking. First, the related notions of “home” and “community,” words which Nancy Jesser points out are “frequently uttered with reverence” (Jesser 1999), were outside of the control of slaves, a fact that no one knew better than the slaves themselves. A further reality of slavery driving the narrative within Beloved concerns the human impulse to protect those one loves, an impulse that leads to so many of the episodes of conflict throughout the novel. These two varieties of desire provide extraordinary insights into ...

How does the Toni Morrison, in “The Bluest Eyes,” develop the character of Pecola so as to expose and attack “racial self-loathing” in the black community?

In the novel, “The Bluest Eye,” Toni Morrison exposes and attacks racial self-loathing in the black community through her main character, Pecola. Pecola is depicted as a black girl. However, she is white at her heart. Pecola has self-loathing that gets worsen as the novel goes on. When the clerk of a store completely ignores her, for the first time, she gets the knowledge of her blackness. She tries to wash it away as ...

Impact of “The Bluest Eyes”

Tony Morrison made me feel pity for the life of the black community and her characters. While analyzing the character Pecola, I could compare her life with the life of a well-known personality and the king of pop music, Michael Jackson. Pecola and Michael Jackson are same in some way or other. The two ware longing for the same thing. They wanted to change their appearance to be recognized in the society. His or her idea is to change something and conform to everyone to be accepted. The story of the novel revolves around the idea of racial self-hatred or ...

Introduction

Besides being a way of thinking, human rights are also a set of political and legal doctrines. These doctrines limit the government power to shape citizens expectations. As such, they benefit ascribe behaviors and proscribe others. The structure of human rights reflects meticulous historical milieu out of which they have evolved and their contours have stretched and changed with the erratic landscape of global society. The general awareness of human rights was gradually formed on the existence of rights that are inherent in all human beings. These rights pre-exist and are superior to the State and all political affiliations. The universal ...

English

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison is a novel which delves into the serious issue of discrimination on the basis of appearance and race. Delving deeply into this novel raises serious issues with respect to cleanliness, order and beauty (Baillie, 21). The author attacks the fundamental western ideas and ideologies with respect to racism by quoting the philosopher Count Joseph de Gobineau. In order to display the manner in which globalised doctrine on race has been accepted by Elihue Micah Whitcomb and her family, the author quotes “all civilizations derive from the white race, that none can exist without its ...

Beloved is a novel written by Tony Morrison and is based on the American Civil War. The plot of the novel is based on the effects, consequences and the results of the Civil War. The author uses characters that would effectively bring out the Civil War theme in terms of social circles and occupations in the society. The novel is based on the characters regarded as slaves or have undergone capture, slavery and escaped from their masters (Haskins & Haskins 13). The main character in the novel, Sethe is a former slave and she underwent cruel times under her master. She manages ...

Toni Morrison, the author of The Bluest Eye, writes a masterpiece novel that describes how the standard of beauty has been socially constructed by the dominant race in the US, Whites. This form of social construct has had an effect on the black community where the lighter one’s skin is, the better they look and are assimilated into the society at large. On the other hand, the darker one looks, they are subjected to internalized racism and considered ugly. According to the novel, the American standard of beauty that is socially acceptable is being white and having blue eyes ( ...

Write an analysis of any one major character in Beloved

Introduction The novel Beloved is the work of Toni Morrison an African-American female writer. It is an interesting story that revolves around the period after the American Civil War which took place between 1861 and 1865. This narrative is based on a true story of a black slave called Margaret Garner who, during the slavery period, had escaped from Kentucky to Ohio which was then a free state. Margaret killed her two-year old daughter than have her face the horrors of slavery after state officials invoked the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and attempted to take her back to her master. ...

Toni Morrison’s Beloved: a slave narrative as social history and as a possible rewriting and criticism of 18th century Age of Enlightenment

In a conversation with Paul Gilroy, Toni Morrison comments on the concept of history in the African-American culture saying:

We live in a land where the past is always erased and America is the innocent future in which immigrants can come and start over, where the slate is clean. The past is absent or romanticized. This culture doesn’t encourage dwelling on, let alone coming to terms with, the truth about the past. For Morrison, the past is not a thing or an experience. It is a life that is always present. This idea is, indeed, reflected in her ...

English: Forgiveness

The main character Sethe, the slave, escaped from the “Sweet House” with her three children, and having been discovered and threatened by her former master to be brought back, she being guided by despair, killed one of her children, the daughter Beloved. Now when managed to save herself and her babies from slavery, she, however, faced accusations. The society turned its back to her. Sethe is guilty in the eyes of the law, in the eyes of the black society and in the eyes of her daughter. The idea of forgiveness is one of the primary here and ...

“Beloved is the forgotten spirit of the past that must be loved even if it is unlovable and elusive”

Toni Morrison’s Beloved depicts a story of the hurtful and violent events that happened during the historically famous Atlantic Slave Trade. As a brief overview, the Atlantic Slave Trade was basically an era characterized by mass buying of African natives for slave trade and their transportation to the New World, mostly in the Central and Western part of Europe, which existed from the 16th to 19th century. Being sold to slavery and maltreated by oppressive masters was extremely traumatic for the Africans—extreme to the point that they resort to killing their sons and daughters, and even themselves just to ...

Rememory of Oneself

The world of literature is full different interesting things. They can be interesting because they might be intriguing or because some unknown secret is revealed. There are also some literary works which have a hidden meaning within them. That kind of literature is particularly curious because it give us an opportunity to learn more about the subject and ourselves. The novel "Beloved" by Toni Morrison is that kind of literature. It retells the history of the American slavery through supernatural events. He tries to explain not only the events of slavery, but how people felt themselves. He argues that people ...

Write an analysis of any one major character in Beloved

Introduction The novel Beloved is the work of Toni Morrison an African-American female writer. This is an interesting story that revolves around the period after the American Civil War which took place between 1861 and 1865. The protagonist of the story is Sethe. Sethe’s character is built on a true story of a black slave called Margaret Garner who, during the slavery period, had escaped from Kentucky to Ohio which was then a free state. Margaret ended up killing her little daughter after state officials invoked the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a law that allowed slave-owners to go after slaves ...

Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain, and Morrison’s Home are two Interesting to read literatures. Each book brings its own uniqueness to the table. Indeed, in both books, there is a brilliant course in regards to exploring their examinations of race, family, and religion. It is obvious that Baldwin is clearly the frankest of the two (however not essentially the most prevailing for that). However, America’s most celebrated novelist, Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison lengthens her philosophical point of view on our history with his story of redemption. Baldwin's first main masterpiece, a story that has founded itself ...

In Toni Morrison's 1997 novel Paradise, the town of Ruby, Oklahoma is an all-black town that has been established to separate themselves from the tyranny of the white man in Civil Rights-Era America. In order to escape the shackles of exploitation, the community that established (and maintains) Ruby ends up creating a world that is completely free of whites. However, in the process, a whole new realm of discrimination and victimizing occurs, in the form of cutting down on 'contamination,' remaining inside the family lines while creating new generations, and maintaining a strict religious, moral and social standard that everyone must ...

The relationship between mother and child is one of the most complicated in all of nature, whether the child is a son or daughter. The biological and emotional attachments that form during the time when the fetus and mother are connected, and when the mother begins raising the child after birth, are rich and wondrous, unlike any other bonds. Small wonder, then, that there are so many different mother archetypes that appear in literature. Whether one is talking about Mother Earth, Mother Goose, the Fairy Godmother, the Virgin Mother, the Voracious Mother, or whether one is thinking about one’s ...

In Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, does her style add value and complement the story?

Many readers find the experience of reading Beloved bewildering and confusing. Daniels refers to “Toni Morrison’s intense and challenging narrative,” (5) and refers to “the bewilderments of the novel’s beginning.” (5). Unsurprisingly, Daniels accounts for this confusion and bewilderment by reference to what he calls, “The shifting points of view and the multiple pasts of the narrative. “ (5) However, this essay will argue that Morrison’s’ style is an integral and vital part of the novel’s message and it is in the style and in the reader’s reaction to it that the real meanings of ...

Toni Morrison’s novel, Song of Solomon focuses on the lives of one, black family unit and in particular, the novel’s central protagonist, Macon ‘Milkman’ Dead III. The novel presents women in a number of ways: as victims, as being in adoration of men, as nurturers and as ‘Earth Mothers’ who embody the plentiful nature of the Earth. This limited view of women is presented in terms of the limited options that ex-slave, black women had. A feminist reading of this text would also need to incorporate a reading of gender relations within a black community as women, and in particular, ...