A Critical Analysis of Novels’, Which Includes the Bluest Eye, Sula and Song of Solomon

Home , Owen Dodson

AMERICAN POSTMODERNISM IN EMPOWERING RACIAL FEMALE IDENTITY: AN ANALYSIS OF SELECT NOVELS OF TONI MORRISON

THESIS

SUBMITTED FOR THE AWARD OF THE DEGREE OF Doctor of Philosophy IN ENGLISH

FATEMEH RAJABI

UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF: Dr. JAWED S. AHMED

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY ALIGARH (INDIA)-202002 2017

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY ALIGARH – 202002 UP (INDIA)

Certificate

This is to certify that the thesis entitled “American Postmodernism in Empowering Racial Female Identity: An Analysis of Select Novels of Toni Morrison”, submitted for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, Department of English, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, is the result of the original research work carried out by Miss Fatemeh Rajabi under my supervision. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the work embodied in this thesis does not form part of any thesis / dissertation already submitted to any University / Institution for the award of any Degree / Diploma.

Dr. Jawed S. Ahmed (Supervisor)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Praise be to the Almighty God who guided me to the path of knowledge.

At the outset, I humbly bow my head before the Almighty Allah, the omniscient, for the accomplishment of this onerous task. His blessings and mercy has been with me throughout my life, particularly during my research. I thank God with profuse respect, love and compassion for enlightening my soul and guiding me to the path of knowledge.

This thesis is the result of my arduous work and consistent dedication towards my study to obtain this goal. The completion of this thesis was possible only with the support and encouragement of numerous people and institutions. I would like to express my gratitude to all those who contributed, in many ways, in its completion and made it an unforgettable experience for me.

Firstly, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Jawed S. Ahmed for the continuous support of my Ph.D study and related research, for his patience, motivation, and immense knowledge. His guidance helped me in at every stage of my research and writing of this thesis. I could not have imagined having a better advisor and mentor for my Ph.D study.

Besides my supervisor, I would like to thank Prof. Seemin Hassan and Prof. Md. Asim Siddiqui, for their insightful comments and encouragement and also for their guidance which enabled me to widen my research from various perspectives. I want to thank Dr. Mohammad Jalaluddin, Mr. Vikas Runwal, Mr. Mohammad Asaf, Mr. Rais Ahmad Khan and Mr. H.K. Sharma for their praiseworthy help.

My parents deserve a special mention for their inseparable support and prayers for me. My father, Mr. Ali Rajabi, who is the greatest support and a great source of inspiration to me who sent me India from Iran to pursue my research. Mrs. Mehri. Pourhosseini, my beloved mother, whose love is always be with me which gave me a real inspiration. They are the people who put the fundamentals of learning into my character, showing me the joy of intellectual pursuit ever since.

Likewise, I would like to thank my worshipful partner, Mr. Mobin Asgharnejad Tehrani, for his unconditional support and cooperation that always helped me in combating with the hurdles which I faced during the course of my research. I also express my heartfelt thanks both to beloved brother, Mr. Heidar Rajabi and my dear sisters, Mrs. Najmeh Rajabi, Mrs. Narjes Rajabi, and Miss Somayeh Rajabi, whose love and care has always been a constant pillar of strength to me throughout my academic pursuit.

My sincere thanks also goes to my best friends, Dr. Abdul Khalique piri, Dr. Zahra Hematti, Dr. Anees ul Islam, Dr. Amir Siddiqui, Dr. Sakina Wani, Dr. Hajra Masood, Mrs. Khadijeh Salarzehi, and Miss. Kulsum for their everlasting love, prayers and faithful support especially during the final stages of the preparation of this thesis.In particular, I am grateful to Dr. Majed Badpa for enlightening me the first glance of research. I thank them for everything, for being helpful to me.

Last but not the least, I thank Maulana Azad Library Staff, AMU, Aligarh, for their help and support.

FATEMEH RAJABI

ABSTRACT

The subject of this thesis comprises three segments: while the primary focus is on the research of the female characters of the chosen author, this paper also deals with the issue of female authorship, that is, the social circumstances that have to a great extent shaped and still impact the literary work of a female writer and finally, the thesis reflects on the manner in which the female author approaches women's issues, that is, how she shapes the female identity.

Because a language had been developed – and has still some sovereignty – in which we mean white and we mean black, or we mean ethnic, but we say something else. And so there is an enormous amount of confusion. It is difficult even to understand the literature of the country if you can’t say white and you can’t say black and you can’t say race. The characters of Toni Morrison’s novels are discredited and ridiculed and perjured. But the idea of those characters, the construction of them as an outside representation of anarchy, collapse, illicit sexuality, all of these negative things that are – that they feared are projected onto this presence. Here is when the reader finds these extraordinary gaps and evasions and destabilizations. The chances of getting a truly complex human black person in a book in this country in the 19th century were unlikely. Melville came probably very close to the sorts of classic complexities, but not real flesh-and-blood people.

The aim of this thesis is to explore and answer the question what is that makes women from culturally opposed communities different, and what is that they, despite the numerous sociological discrepancies, still have in common. Thus, the main task of this research was to shed light on, still rather vaguely defined, the women's issues by drawing parallels between the women, that is, the female characters who live in specific political, sociological and cultural conditions typical of the West (female characters of Toni Morrison). In order to reach the answer to a complex question such as this one, the thesis tackles the matters that the author herself find the most relevant, that is, the themes instrumental in defining the female identity. By means of the analysis of these life matters, the thesis provides insight into not just the psyche of individual characters, but also illustrates the dynamics of an entire society: beliefs, customs, hierarchies of power, etc.

The themes that have been given the most attention are: marriage, motherhood, friendship between women, female sexuality, family and the relationship of one with the community and with oneself. By the method of analyzing, the research work reached the conclusion that social factors, such as economic climate, political orientation and the quality of the educational system, undoubtedly affect the level of awareness of women, the attitude of the society toward women and the attitude women nurture towards themselves. Nevertheless, regardless of the numerous and significant differences between the women in the West, there are segments they have in common, despite the external, social factors. These similarities provide the answer to the question what makes the essence of women, that is, what makes them special and different from men.

The second aim of this thesis is also related to the women's issues, but in the sphere of authorship, that is, literature, literary theory and criticism. It reflects on the impediments and prejudices that surrounded the first proclaimed female authors, who through their battle for the right to share their ideas in the written form actually carried out a revolution in the name of liberation of the female gender. The female struggle for the right to write and publish is much more than a simple fight for a place in a profession - it is a fight for the freedom of thought, the freedom of speech and for the right to be actively present in the public life. By relying on history of literature, as well as feminist criticism, the thesis deals with the presence of female authors in the world of literature and the status they are given in the world of literary criticism. Moreover, it refers to the key authors and works that pioneered when it comes to the introduction of the women's issues, underlining the importance of the female emancipation in and through literature.

Alongside the matter of female authorship in general, the research also included the literary experiences of the mentioned author, focusing on how they define the process of writing, what it feels like to be a female author and in what ways they shape their heroines. This makes the third task of this research and that is the relationship female author has toward their female characters. Based on the chosen author and novels, the thesis explores the motivation behind creating heroines the way they are, literary techniques and ideological convictions that the female author relies on in creating psychological profiles of her female protagonists.

The critical analysis is carried out on the basis of two theoretical perspectives: feminism, postmodernism, and racism. These theories were chosen due to their relevance when it comes to the women's issues and female authorship. Bearing in mind that feminism is always referred to in relation to the female existence, the feminist theory naturally had to be one of the fundamental elements of this project. The analysis reflects on the relationship the chosen author herself has toward the feminist ideology, which is ambivalent in her case. This framework is referred to in the analysis of the heroines as well, where its contribution to raising awareness and female emancipation is assessed. Since in the process of research of the subject of this project it became clear that a single theoretical perspective is not sufficient for implementing a comprehensive analysis of the women's issues, the thesis includes two additional theoretical approaches besides feminism, postmodernism, and racism.

The author is referred to as postmodernist author and her works, indeed, reflects numerous postmodernist characteristics. Hence, with regard to the postmodernist aspects of the chosen novels, the thesis bases itself on the analysis of the attitude postmodernism takes towards female author and the female gender in general. Bearing in mind contradictory opinions of critics regarding the rapport between postmodernism, which is oriented toward literary form and experimentation, and the women's issues, which requires space for meaningful content, the thesis is trying to find a point of convergence, that is, elements of postmodernism conducive to conveying the complexity and difficulties of female existence. It locates this consensus between apparently irreconcilable opposites in the subversive power they share.

Finally, a big segment of the theoretical basis of this doctoral project is the theory of postmodernism, which explores asymmetrical hierarchies of power, spirit of liberalism and the master-slave relationship, which is often identified as the basis of the relationships between men and women in the communities of the author, while the connection between the theory of postmodernism and the work of Toni Morrison is obvious, the thesis lays out the arguments which make this theory not just relevant but also necessary when it comes to the analysis of works by Toni Morrison, as well.

This kind of approach reveals not just that postmodernism is not exclusively linked just to a battleground of conflicting opinions and political forces, but also

3 among the matters of concern that thinkers identifies are the following: whether postmodernism in fact represents a radical break with modernism or just an opposition to certain ideas and trends of high-modernism; if postmodern is a style of its own or whether it should be regarded merely as a periodizing concept; whether it has a revolutionary potential due to its revolt against to any kind of meta-narrative and its particular interest in giving way to “other voices” and “other worlds” that have been silenced under the oppression of the mainstream meta-narrative for too long (i.e. women; sexual minorities; ethnic minorities; colonized peoples who happen to have their own unique stories to tell); whether it is nothing but commercialization of modernism and further degeneration of its aspirations to “market eclecticism”; whether we view it as originating in the cultural logic of capitalism or whether we attribute its rise to the emergence of postindustrial society with postmodernism being its new representation of the state of art. Furthermore, subjugation and postmodernism do not have to apply to entire territories, they can influence only certain racial or ethnical groups, such as the black population in parts of the USA, which is one of the issues Morrison tackles in her novels.

The conclusions reached at the end of research work on the basis of extensive rhetorical analysis, application of relevant theoretical approaches and with reference to renowned critics suggest the significant impact of the social and primarily economic and political, factors on the position and role of women in society. Apart from that, cultural differences between the females west determine the priorities and values of women, who accordingly create the image of themselves and their own worth. However, what women worldwide share is the need to find and build their sense of self, either through professional endeavors or through relationships with others, for instance through motherhood, marriage or close friendship. Hence, the author insist on making their heroines find their paths, often fraught with challenges and temptations by disposing of fear, illusions and female ills, such as vanity and envy. On that road of self- discovery they recognize not only the complexity but also the beauty of female friendship, which gives them a context they can use in rebuilding or strengthening their suppressed or even erased identity.

CONTENTS

Page Nos.

Chapter I Postmodernism and Brief Survey of Black Literature 1 - 20

Chapter II Life and Writing Career of Toni Morrison and Black Feminism 21 - 59 1 Life and writing career 1.1 Toni Morrison 2. Feminism 2.1 Afro- American Feminism and Literary History 2.1.1 Language and the Abolitionist Movement 2.1.2 Slave Narratives 2.1.3 Women’s Slavery 2.1.4 Afro- American Women’s Childbirth and Slavery 2.1.5 Suffrage Movements and Women’s Writing 2.1.6 The Harlem Renaissance Writers 3. Modernist Writers 3.1 Black Movement in Twentieth Century 3.2 Contemporary Women Colour World 4. Characteristics of the Novels of Afro- American and European American 4.1 Contemporary Black Feminist Writers

Chapter III Female Authorship and the Women’s Issues 60 - 96 1 Female Authorship 1.1 Women’s Issues in Feminism 1.2 Women’s Issues in Postmodernism 2. Toni Morrison’s Authorship 2.1 Morrison’s View on African Heritage and the Place of Black Literature in the US 2.2 The Importance of Language and Writing for Morrison 2.3 Morrison and Ideologies

2.4 Black Women vs. White Women and the Shortcomings of Feminism 2.5 Morrison’s Female Characters and Concerns 2.6 Morrison and Postmodernism 3. The Feminist Theory 4. The Postmodern Theory

Chapter IV A Critical Analysis of the Novels ‘The Bluest Eye’, ‘Sula’ and ‘Song of Solomon’ 97 - 127 1. The Bluest Eye (1970) 2. Sula (1973) 3. Song of Solomon (1977)

Chapter V A Critical Analysis of the Novels ‘Tar Baby’, ‘Beloved’ and ‘Jazz’ 128 -160 1. Tar Baby ¼1981) 2. Beloved (1987) 3. Jazz (1992)

Chapter VI Conclusion 161 - 173

Bibliography 174 - 187

CHAPTER - I

Postmodernism and a Brief Survey of Black Literature

Chapter I

Postmodernism and a Brief Survey of Black Literature

Introduction:

Postmodernism, despite conspicuous dissent and resistance, continues to be a prominent dimension of intellectual history. As a major cultural and political movement of history, the characteristics and beliefs of postmodernism came to dominate all aspects of life. Following Reformation, Enlightenment, the Romantic era, and Modernism, the tenets of Postmodernism affected western culture and changed the way humanity thought about itself and its place in the world.

Postmodernism touched all areas of society. Some writers took the position that postmodernism was an extension of Modernism, others viewed it as a new movement with separate characteristics, while still others viewed it as merely a literary movement. Hassan (1982), a prolific commentator on postmodernist views, described the period as having “related cultural tendencies, a constellation of values, and a repertoire of procedures and attitudes.” Later, Hassan described Postmodernism as something more than a literary development; he postulated that “it represented a broad response to pressing contemporary issue, and was like to emerge in social practices as within literary products.”

Similar to Hassan, Linn (1996) described postmodernism as a “widespread cultural development which has been taking shape during the last few decades.” Others, such as Chabot, saw postmodernism as a broad term that only described artistic developments. Jameson argues that postmodernism emerged as a reaction to high Modernism. Laqueur suggested that “postmodernism is mainly preoccupied with literary theory and criticism, with semiotics and narrative, with metcriticism, narratology and theories of the grotesque.” For this study, postmodernism is classified as a cultural movement that was separate from modernism.

A contributing factor to the development of postmodernism was the climate after World War II. World War II caused mass destruction; demonstrated unprecedented human cruelty, and introduced new weapons that could cause cataclysmic annihilation. World War II also altered the landscape as new geographic

boundaries were drawn by the actions of those responsible for the formation of the Iron Curtain. In the 1950s, not only did fashion and styles quickly come and go, but television and advertising permeated and persuaded society as never before.

The tumultuous decade of the 1960s brought about the earliest hints of a postmodern revolution. The new youth movement was the center of attraction as phrases such as “Flower Power,” “Peace,” and “Make love Not War,” All these epitomized a generation. This subculture, with its music, poster art, and drugs, created a lifestyle which rebelled against authority and sought liberation from the norms of the existing society. More importantly, it was during the 1960s that “previously” silent groups were defined by differences of race, gender, sexual

preferences, ethnicity, native status, and class. In general, the 1960s possessed energy and a vitality; it was a decade of optimism about technology, media, and what would be known as pop culture.

However, the optimism of the 1960s quickly eroded in the 1970s. In the United States this decade was famous for Vietnam War and many others events like Equal Rights Amendments. But the excesses of the 1970s gave way to conservative backlash of the 1980s. The Equal Rights Amendment was defeated in 1982, thus temporarily slowing the women’s movement. By 1985 America saw a rising homeless population. Seen by some as an outgrowth of the sexual revolution, acquired immunity deficiency syndrome surfaced in the mid-1980s. The 1980s became a “self- help generation” with a focus on psychotherapy and pop psychology. The youths of the decade were turned into music television, and they faced a media-hyped ‘war on drugs’ that failed to reduce or even fairly reported the class-less, race-blind, widespread addictions.

Postmodernism, thus, has several striking characteristics that define it as the movement as well as separate it from earlier modernist views. Largely, the postmodern view was characterized by overwhelming feeling of discontent far greater than the pessimism of modern age. Postmodernist views stemmed from dissatisfaction with the traditional philosophic reverence for logic, science, and economics and with the attempts to create “totalizing” theories in science, art, social science and history.

Toni Morrison is one of the foremost 20th century African-American women novelists who has attempted to express problems of prejudice and discrimination

2 inflicted on women through her writings. She marks a deep insight into the racial problems that are being confronted by the Blacks since their existence. Being African- American woman, Morrison boldly presents Afro-American feminist consciousness through her literary endeavor where she strongly expresses her philosophy as a feminist. She is awakened and conscious about women’s life and problems and believes that feminist consciousness is the experience in a certain way of specific contradiction in the existing social order. As a result, her novels manifest and highlight Black women who are doubly differentiated in the form of male standard and poverty as well as Euro-American women’s standard.

Toni Morrison born on 18th Feb. 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, USA, is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue and richly detailed black characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved. She has been a member of both the National Council on the Arts and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

In her works, Morrison has explored the experiences and roles of black women in a racist and male-dominated society. The unique cultural inheritance of African Americans is the center of her complex and multi-layered narratives.

The present thesis entitled“American Postmodernism in Empowering Racial Female Identity: An Analysis of Select Novels of Toni Morrison” aims at studying and critically exploring the majority of the novels by Toni Morrison in the light of the facts mentioned above. The scholars around the globe have attempted to study and scrutinize Morrison from different points of view such as social realism, male domination and double harassment by the Black as well as White. However, accepting the limitations of the earlier studies, the researcher has sought an exhausting study of the novels of Morrison as she deals with the problems pertaining to the complex social identities of black women and at the same time the issues of the individual that has to engage with the Black and White Communities. “Morrison’s works move from self-destruction to the hope that there can be a resolution or growth of a sense of self.” (Mishra 91)

The present study earnestly meditates on the specific objectives to study, identify, discuss, analyze and interpret various problems of empowering female racial identity expressed and marked in the novels of Morrison and with the purpose of exploring these aspects in the context of social complexities of her time as follows:

1) To study the realistic and practical novels more and more as an unbiased presentation of real life in the contemporary rather than chronicled setting. Also study of definition and concept of post-modernism and black literature.

2) To study primarily the Black and White classes and their problems related to different social issues, race, gender and marginality.

3) To evaluate Toni Morrison’s contribution to a novel of feminine thoughts and novel of reality and her overall appraisal as a well-known novelist of the early 20th century, and as a pioneering figure.

4) To study Morrison’s impact on serious novels from 1970 onwards. It was Morrison who tried to twist novel from imagination to realism. It is a prime concern to study her novels from ground reality.

The present research work studies the given aims and objectives. For this, the researcher has collected data from the primary as well as secondary sources.

The primary sources are six novels, children literature, short stories, plays and non-fiction, and the secondary sources are the reviews, articles, criticism on the works published in various journals, magazines and in the books. The research work entirely depends upon primary sources and secondary sources. The methodology used in this research work is analytical. The texts by Toni Morrison selected for the present research work are: The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), and Jazz. (1992)

Toni Morrison is a daughter of Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. She is the second of four children in a working-class family. She is the Nobel Prize laureate and a Black American feminist writer, especially notable for her portrayal of the alienated individuals from the United States. All her novels have received a grand and extensive critical acclaim worldwide. She was the first Afro-American to win the Nobel Prize since 1938. “She is more widely read by a broader cross section of the

American reading public than any other black writer.” (Pratima 101) Thus, by studying Morrison and her novels on a better ground, it becomes apt to take a brief survey of Black literature or African-American literature.

African-American literature is believed to be a literature written by, about and sometimes specifically for the African-Americans. It is also believed that African- American literature is a body of literature produced in the United States by the writers of African descent. The genre, African-American literature and its origin go back to the 18th and 19th centuries. During the 18th and 19th centuries, writers like Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano and others brought the genre and early high point with the Harlem Renaissance. Their writing is also known as slave narratives. Literature continues to enjoy a high status with authors such as Toni Morrison, Walter Mosley, Maya Angelou and others who are considered to be among the top writers in the United States. These writers have strongly explored certain issues such as the role of African-Americans within the larger African society. Their themes range from the phenomena like racism, slavery, equality, African-American culture, African society etc.

The American society has undergone continual changes over a period of time. The place of African-Americans in American society has also been changing. The case with the African-American literature is also similar. The focus of African- American literature has also been shifted which is marked clearly. It is seen that before the American civil-war, African-American literature basically focused on the problem of slavery. However, with the arrival of the 20th century, famous writers such as W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington and others opened a debate whether to confront, appease or resist attitudes in the United States. Authors such as Richard Wright and others wrote on the issues of racial segregation and Black Nationalism during the time of American Civil Rights Movement. Presently, African American literature is an important and integral part of American literary culture and the writers writing under this stream have excelled themselves as the writers of world standard.

African American literature bears certain characteristics and themes. African American literature is the writing by the people of African descent living in the United States of America, and African- American history and life are extremely varied. There is a great variation marked in African American literature too. African-

American literature generally focuses on the themes of particular interest to Blacks in the United States, such as the role of African Americans with the larger American society. Morrison in her rendition of mothering as a political and public enterprise, emerges as a social commentator and political theorist who radically, through her maternal philosophy, reworks, rethinks and reconfigures the concerns and strategies of African American, and in particular black women’s emancipation in America. Moreover, they try to express what it means to be an American. Several scholars have aptly commented on this aspect.

The African- American literature basically meditates on and explores the issues of freedom and equality because they were long denied freedom and equality in the United States by the Whites. Along with the theme of freedom and equality, they also clearly deal with African American culture, racism, slavery, realism etc. It is an accepted fact that African-American literature forms a vital branch of literature and it is believed that it differs from post-colonial literature in that it is written by the members of minority community who reside within a nation of vast economic power. It is also famous for its strong tradition of incorporating oral poetry into itself. Many examples of oral poetry in African- American culture which include spirituals and gospels, music, blues, and raps are found there and they form a part of their literature. This oral literature pictures African-American tradition in a realistic manner.

However, apart from several characteristics of African-American literature, it is a fact that it does not form the exclusive definition of the genre. As with any type of literature, there are disagreements as to the genre’s definitions and questions in relation with addition of the writers under this category. Some scholars include in African- American literature, writings by African Americans which lack Black characters and situations and are not particularly targeted at Black audiences. Thus, there is a lack of the exclusive definitions of the genre. To some extent, African American literature has shown resistance to use the Western Literary theory for its analysis because scholars from the literature desired to allow the Black tradition to speak for itself, about its nature and various functions rather than to read it or analyze it in terms of literary theories borrowed wholly from the other traditions.

The history of African American literature is divided under various heads such as Early African American literature, Slave Narratives, Post-slavery era, Harlem

Renaissance and Recent History. African American history goes back to the emergence of The United States as an independent country; in the same way, African American literature goes back to its roots. There are many prominent writers who have contributed to African American literature.

Among the first prominent African-American writers was Phillis Wheatley. Phillis Wheatley is famous for her Poems on Various Subjects. This book was published three years before American Independence. She was born in Senegal, Africa. She was captured and sold into slavery at the age of seventeen and was brought to America. At the initial stage, she did not know English. However, she mastered the English language. Her poetry was appreciated by many of the leading figures of American Revolution. There were suspicions regarding her authorship and she had to fight for herself in the court to prove that it was she who actually wrote her own poetry. Critics believe that Wheatley’s successful defense was the first recognition of African-American literature.

Jupiter Hammon is also one among the early African-American authors. He is considered to be the first published Black writer in America and is famous for Broad Size. (1761) In 1778, Hammon wrote An Ode to Phillis Wheatley wherein he expressed deep concern about shared humanity and common bonds. In 1786, he gave his well-known address to the Negros of the State of New York. He is famous for his quote, “if we should ever get to heaven, we shall find nobody to reproach us for being Black or for being Slaves.” His speeches always promoted the idea of a gradual emancipation as the way of ending slavery. It is believed that he mentioned this plan because he knew that slavery was so deeply rooted in the American society that immediate emancipation of all slaves would be difficult to achieve. The fact is that he remained a slave until his death and his speech as were later printed by several groups opposed to slavery.

Among others are William Wells Brown and Victor Sejour. They produced the earlier works of fiction. Victor Sejour was born in New Orlean. However, he moved to France at the age of 19. He published his short stories there in 1987. His Le Mulatre represents the first known fiction by an African- American. But as it was published in a French journal, it has explicitly no influence on later American literature.

William Brown is regarded as a prominent abolitionist, lecturer, novelist, playwright and historian. He himself was born into slavery in the Southern United States. He escaped to the north later on and worked for abolitionist cause there and became a prolific writer. His Clotel: or The President’s Daughter (1853) is considered to be the first African-American novel. The novel is thematically based on what was at that time considered to be rumor about Thomas Jefferson fathering a daughter with a slave, Sally Hemings. But, because the novel was published in England, it is not considered as the First African-American novel published in the United States. That is why, the novel by Harriet Wilson Our Nig (1859) is given the honor as the first African-American novel published in the United States which deals with the details of the difficult lives of the Northern Free Blacks.

A slave narrative is believed to be the sub-genre of African-American literature. It is also believed to have emerged in the middle of the 19th century. The history has witnessed a controversy over slavery which contributed to impassioned literature on the multiple facets of the issue. This view is explicitly marked in the books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. (1852) The book narrates the abolitionist view of the evils of slavery; however, southern writers like William Gilmore Simms represented the pro-slavery view point.

Most of the people suffered from the evils of slavery, and as a result, to present the true reality of slavery, a number of former slaves wrote slave narratives, which soon became the backbone of African American literature. Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass were famous among them. Some six thousand former slaves from North America and the Caribbean island wrote chronicles of their lives, with a majority of these published as separate books or pamphlets. Scholars broadly categorize slave narrative into three distinct forms: tales of religious redemption, tales to inspire the abolitionist struggle and tales of progress. The tales bear typical characteristics because they were written to inspire the abolitionist struggle and they are the most famous because they tend to have a strong autobiographical motive. Many critics and scholars have now recognized it as the most literary of all 19th century writings by African Americans. Two of them were the most well-known; they were Frederick Douglass’s autobiography and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. (1861)

Frederick Douglass (1818-95) too is regarded as a prolific writer; however, he first came to public attention as an orator and as the author of his autobiographical slave narrative. But he finally became the most prominent African American of his time and one of the most influential lecturers and authors in American history. Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland; he eventually escaped and worked for numerous abolitionist causes. He also edited a number of newspapers. Douglass’ best- known work is his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. (1845) At that time, some critics attacked the book, and did not believe that a black man could have written such an eloquent work. Despite this, the book was an immediate bestseller which he later revised and expanded as his autobiography and was republished as My Bondage and My Freedom. (1855) In addition to active involvement during his life, he also wrote numerous influential articles and essays exposing the reality of the Blacks.

After the initial poetical debut of Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley, the main literary expression of the Negro was the slave narrative. One of the earliest of these narratives came from the pen of Gustavas Vassa, an African from Nigeria. This was a time of great pamphleteering in the United States. The free Africans in the North, and those who had escaped from slavery in the South, made their mark upon this time and awakened the conscience of the nation. Their lack of formal educational attainments gave their narratives a strong and rough-hewed truth, more arresting than scholarship.

Gustavas Vassa established his reputation with an autobiography, first printed in England. He was born in 1745, and was kidnapped by the slaves when he was eleven years old and taken to America. He was placed in service on a plantation in Virginia. Eventually, he was able to purchase his freedom. He left the United States, made his home in England and became active in the British anti-slavery movement. In 1790, he presented a petition to Parliament to abolish the slave trade. His autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Gustavas Vassa, was an immediate success and saw five editions.

When slavery was abolished in the United States, the plight of African- American did not change much. Thus, after the end of slavery and the American Civil War, a number of African American authors continued to write non-fiction works

about the condition of African- Americans in the country. Many of these writers stand tall in this category. Among the most prominent of these writers is W.E.B. Dubois. (1868-1963) He was one of the original founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. At the turn of the century, Dubois published a highly influential collection of essays titled The Souls of Black Folk. The writings on race were innovational and they were the outcome of Dubois’s personal experiences in which he describes how African Americans lied in American society. He called for the need of African Americans to work together, out of their common interests, work together to battle prejudice and inequality.

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) is also another prominent author of this time. He, in many ways, represented opposite views from Dubois. Washington was an educator and the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, a Black College in Alabama. He was widely acclaimed for Up from Slavery, (1901) The Future of the American Negro, (1899) Tuskegee and Its People (1905) and My Larger Education. (1911) In contrast to Dubois, Washington adopted a more, confrontational attitude towards ending racial strife in America. He believed that the Blacks should first raise themselves up and prove themselves the equal of the Whites before asking for an end to racism. Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was the third writer who gained attention during this period. He was a publisher, journalist, and crusader for Black Nationalism and best known as a champion of Black Nationalism and the Back- to-Africa movement. The movement encouraged people of African ancestry to return to their ancestral homeland. He wrote a number of essays and non-fiction books.

The Harlem Renaissance from 1920 to 1940 brought a new fringe to African American literature. During the period of this literary flowering among Black writers, Harlem became the Mecca, the stimulating Holy City, drawing pilgrims from all over the country and from some places abroad. Talented authors, playwrights, painters, and sculptors came forth eagerly showing their wares of social thought and culture with numerous Black artists, musicians, and others producing classic works in the fields from jazz to theatre; the renaissance is perhaps best known for the literature that came out of it.

This migration developed a new sense of independence in the Black community. They contributed to the vibrant Black urban culture seen during the

Harlem Renaissance. The migration also empowered the growing American Civil Rights movement, which made a powerful impression on Black writers during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Black activists were pushing to end segregation and racism and create a new sense of Black Nationalism. Therefore, Black authors attempted to address these issues via their writings.

Three men, W. E. B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke, cast a guiding influence over this movement without becoming a part of the social climbing and pseudo-intellectual aspect of it. W. E. B. DuBois, by continuously challenging the old concepts and misinterpretations of African American life, gave enlightened directions to a whole generation. As the editor of The Crisis, he introduced many new black writers and extended his helpful and disciplined hand when it was needed. Following the death of Booker T. Washington and the decline of the Booker T. Washington school of thought, he became the spiritual father of new black intelligentsia.

One of the first writers, James Baldwin addressed the issues of race and sexuality. Baldwin, who is best known for his novel Go Tell it on the Mountain, wrote deeply personal stories and essays while examining what it was like to be both Black and homosexual at a time when neither of these identities was accepted by the American culture. In all, he wrote nearly 20 books, including such classics as Another Country and The Fire Next Time.

Early in the Harlem literary renaissance period, the Black Ghetto became an attraction for a varied assortment of white celebrities. Some were insipid rebels, defying the mores of their upbringing by associating with Negroes on a socially equal level. Some were too rich to work, not educated enough to teach, and not holy enough to preach. Others were searching for the mythological ‘noble savage’ the ‘exotic Negro.’

These professional exotics were generally college educated Negroes who had become estranged from their families and the environment of their upbringing. They talked at length about the great books within them waiting to be written. Their white sponsors continued to subsidize them while they ‘developed their latent talent.’ Of course, the ‘great books’ of these camp followers never got written and, eventually, their white sponsors realized that they were never going to write not even a good

11 letter. Ironically, these sophisticates made a definite contribution to the period of the ‘New Negro Literary Renaissance.’ In socially inclined company, they proved that a black American could behave with as much attention to the details of social protocol as the best bred and richest white person in the country. They could balance a cocktail glass with expertness. Behind their pretense of being writers they were really actors, and rather good ones. They were generally better informed than their white sponsors and could easily participate in a discussion of the writings of Marcel Proust in one minute, and the music of Ludwig van Beethoven in the next. As social parasites, they conducted themselves with a smoothness approaching an artistic accomplishment. Unknown to them, their conduct had done much to eliminate one of the major prevailing stereotypes of African American life and manners.

Baldwin’s idol and friend was author Richard Wright, whom Baldwin called the greatest Black writer in the world. Wright is best known for his novel Natie Son, (1940) which tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a Black man struggling for acceptance in Chicago. Baldwin was so impressed by the novel that he titled a collection of his own essays Notes of a Native Son, with reference to Wright’s novel. However, their friendship fell apart due to one of the book’s essays, Everybody’s Protest Novel, which criticized Native Son for lacking credible characters and psychological complexity. Among Wright’s other books are the semi- autobiographical novels Black Boy (1945), The Outsider (1953), and White Man, Listen! (1957)

The other great novelist of this period is Ralph Ellison, best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. Even though Ellison did not complete another novel during his lifetime, Invisible Man was so influential that it secured his place in literary history. After Ellison’s death, a second novel, Juneteenth, was pieced together from the 2,000-plus pages he had written over forty years.

The Civil Rights period also saw the rise of female Black poets, most notably Gwendolyn Brooks, who became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize. It was awarded to her in 1949 for the book of poetry, Annie Allen. Along with Brooks, other female poets who became well known during the 1950s and 60s are Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez.

During this time, a number of playwrights also got national attention, notably Lorraine Hansberry, whose play A Raisin in the Sun focuses on a poor Black family living in Chicago. The play won the 1959 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Another playwright who gained attention was Amiri Baraka, who wrote controversial Broadway plays. In more recent years, Baraka has become famous for his poetry and music criticism.

It is also worth noting that a number of important essays and books about human rights were written by the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. One of the leading examples of these is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail.’

In the intervening years between the end of the Negro Renaissance and the emergence of Richard Wright, Black writers’ genuine talent continued to produce books of good caliber. The lack of sponsorship and pampering had made them take serious stock of themselves and their intentions. The Crisis, organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Opportunity, organ of the National Urban League, continued to furnish a publishing outlet for the new black writers. The general magazines published stories by black writers intermittently, seemingly on a quota basis. During this period, writers like Ralph Ellison, Henry B. Jones, Marian Minus, Ted Poston, Lawrence D. Reddick, and Grace W. Thompkins published their first short stories.

In 1936, Richard Wright’s first short story received appreciable attention. ‘Big Boy Leaves Home,’ appeared in the anthology, The New Caravan. ‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch’ was published in American Stuff, ‘Anthology of the Federal Writers Project’, was published in the next year. In 1938, when his first book, Uncle Tom’s Children, won a $500 prize contest conducted by Story Magazine, Wright’s talent received national attention. With the publication of his phenomenally successful novel, Native Son, in 1940, a new era in African American literature had begun. Here, at last, he was a black writer who undeniably wrote considerably better than many of his white contemporaries. As a short story craftsman, he was the most accomplished black writer since Charles W. Chesnutt.

After the emergence of Richard Wright, the period of indulgence for Negro writers was over. Therefore, black writers had to stand or fall by the same standards and judgments used to evaluate the work of white writers. The era of the patronized

and pampered black writer had at last come to an end. The closing of this era may, in the final analysis can be said to be the greatest contribution Richard Wright made to the status of Negro writers and to Negro literature. When the United States entered the Second World War, the active Negro writers, like most other writers in the country, turned their talents to some activity in relation to the war.

A new crop of post-war black writers was emerging. In their stories they treated new aspects of African American life or brought new insights to the old aspects. Principally, they were good storytellers, aside from any message they wanted to get across to their readers. The weepy sociological propaganda stories (so prevalent during the depression era) had their day with the Negro writer and all others. There would still be protest stories, but the protest would now have to meet the standards of living literature. Opportunity and The Crisis, once the proving ground for so many new black writers, were no longer performing that much needed service. The best of the new writers found acceptance in the general magazines. Among these are James Baldwin, Lloyd Brown, Arthur P. Davis, Owen Dodson, Lance Jeffers, John O. Killens, Robert H Lucas, Albert Murray and a host of other.

With the rise of nationalism and independent states in Africa, and the rapid change of the status of the Negro in the United States, the material used by black writers and their treatment of it, reflect a breaking away from the old mooring. Among black writers, the period of the late 1940s solely belonged to Richard Wright. The period of the 1960s was the period of James Baldwin.

The flourishing literary talent of James Baldwin had no easy birth, and he did not emerge overnight, as some of his new discoveries would have one believe. For years this talent was in incubation, in the ghetto of Harlem, before he went to Europe in (1959) in an attempt to discover the United States and how he and his people relate to it. The book in which that discovery is portrayed, The Fire Next Time, is a continuation of his search for place and definition. Baldwin, more than any other writer of our times, has succeeded in restoring the personal essay to its place as a form of creative literature. From his narrow vantage point of personal grievance, he opened a window on the world. He has played the role traditionally assigned to thinkers concerned with the improvement of human conditions, that of alarmists. He called national attention to things in the society that need to be corrected and the things that

need to be celebrated.

When Richard Wright died in Paris in 1960, a new generation of black writers, partly influenced by him, was beginning to explore, as Ralph Ellison said that it formed a full range of American Negro humanity. In the short stories and novels of such writers as Frank London Brown, William Melvin Kelly, Le Roi Jones, Paule Marshall, Rosa Guy, and Ernest J. Gaines, both a new dimension and a new direction in writing were seen. They have questioned and challenged all the previous interpretations of African American life. While doing this, they have created the basis for a new American literature.

African American literature reached the mainstream in the 1970s as books by Black writers continually achieved the best-selling as well as award- winning status. These writers were also accepted by the academia with numerous colleges and universities offering courses in African American literature.

One of the first books to top the bestseller lists was Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley. The book, a fictionalized account of Haley’s family history beginning with the kidnapping of Haley’s ancestor Kunta Kinte in Gambia through his life as a slave in the United States, won the Pulitzer Prize and became a popular television mini-series. Haley also wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X in 1965.

The novelist and poet, Alice Walker won both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for her novel The Color Purple in 1982, An Epistolary Novel (a book written in the form of letters), The Color Purple narrates the story of Celie, a young woman who is sexually abused.

However, one of the most important African American writers in recent years is Toni Morrison. As a New York editor in the 1960s and 70s, Morrison helped to promote Black Literature and made it flourish. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. Among her most famous novels is Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. This story describes a slave who found freedom but killed her infant daughter to save her from a life of slavery. Another important novel is Song of Solomon, a tale about materialism and brotherhood. Morrison is the first African American woman to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Gay Jones,

Ishmael Reed, Jamaica Kincaid, Randall Kenan and John Edgar Wideman are the other important writers in recent years.

In addition to the novelists, African American poets have also garnered attention. Maya Angelou read a poem at Bill Clinton’s inauguration; Rita Dove won the Pulitzer Prize and served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995, and the lesser-known poets like Thylias Moss, James Emanuel, and Natasha Trethewey were praised for their innovative work. Notable Black playwrights include Ntozake Shange and the prolific August Wilson, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his plays. And recently, Edward P. Junes won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Known World, the novel about a black slaveholder in the Antebellum South.

It is an accepted fact that the African American literature has also crossed over to genre fiction. A pioneer in this area is Chester Himes, who in the 1950s and 60s wrote a series of detective novels featuring Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones, two New York City police detectives. Himes paved the way for the later crime novels of Walter Mosley. African Americans are also represented in the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror, with Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due, Robert Fleming, Brandon Massey, Charles R. Saunders, John Ridley, John M. Faucette, Sheree Thomas and Nalo Hopkinson being just a few of the well-known African American authors.

Finally, African American literature has gained an added attention through the work of talk show host Oprah Winfrey, who has repeatedly leveraged her fame to promote literature through the medium of her Oprah’s Book Club. At times, she has brought African American writers a far broader audience than they otherwise might have received. “The black woman was deprived of a strong black man on whom she could rely for protection.” (Learner: 79)

Along with African American literature in the United States, African American literature exists both within and outside American literature. Critics and scholars believe that African American literature is part of a Balkanization of American literature. In fact there is a debate among the scholars about whether African American literature exists both inside and outside American literature. The idea of African American literature is grounded in the experience of Black people in the United States.

Even though, African Americans have long claimed an American identity, during most of United States history they were not accepted as full citizens. As a result, they were part of America while also being outside it. The same fact may be applicable for African American literature. While it exists fully within the framework of a larger American literature, it also exists as its own entity and identity. As a result, new styles of storytelling and unique voices are created in isolation. The typical artistic pattern has become true with many aspects of African American culture over the last century, with jazz and hip hop being just two artistic examples that developed in isolation within the Black community before reaching a larger audience and eventually revitalizing American culture.

A faction of conservative academics and intellectuals argue that African American literature only exists as part of a balkanization of literature over the last few decades or as an extension of the culture wars into the field of literature. According to these critics, literature is splitting into distinct and separate groupings because of the rise of identity politics in the United States and other parts of the world. These critics reject bringing identity politics into literature because this would mean that only women could write about women, for women, and only Blacks about Blacks for Blacks. There is a general opposition to this group-based approach to writing as it is believed that it limits the ability of literature to explore the overall human condition and, more importantly, judges ethnic writers merely on the basis of their race.

Some of the criticism of African American literature over the years has come from within the African American community. This results from complaints that Black literature sometimes does not portray Black people in a positive light. The clash of aesthetics and racial politics has its beginnings in the comments made by W.E.B. DuBois. In 1921, he wrote that they want everything that is said about them to tell of the best and highest and noblest in them. They insisted that Art and Propaganda be one. He added to this in 1926 by saying that all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists.

DuBois and the editors of The Crisis consistently stated that literature was a tool in the struggle for African American political liberation. DuBois’s belief in the propaganda value of art showed most clearly when he clashed in 1928 with African American author, Claude McKay over McKay’s best-selling novel Home to Harlem.

To DuBois, the novel’s frank depictions of sexuality and the night life in Harlem only appealed to the Prurient Demand(s) of white readers and publishers looking for portrayals of Black licentiousness. The same idea was repeated by others in the Black community when the author, Wallace Thurman published his novel The Blacker the Berry in 1929. Many African American writers did not agree with the viewpoint that all Black literature should be propaganda, and instead stated that literature should present the truth about life and people.

Langston Hughes articulated this view in his essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926), when he said that Black artists intended to express themselves freely no matter what the Black public or white public believed. Lorraine Bethel appropriately puts:

I believe that there is a great separate and identifiable tradition of black women writers, simultaneously existing within and independent of the American. Afro-American is an American female tradition. (Benthal: 178)

The hypothesis of the research is based on the major thrust, “Interrelationship of race, class, gender in the novels of Toni Morrison” in the light of identity formations of Afro-American women. The scheme of chapterization in Morrison’s is based on the various phases in the life of the writer. The present thesis comprises six chapters. Chapter I is, ‘Postmodernism and a Brief Survey of Black Literature’; Chapter II is, ‘life and writing career of Toni Morrison, part two ‘Feminism’, which speaks of ‘Afro-American Feminism and Literary History, Language and the Abolitionist Movement, Slave Narratives, Women’s Slavery, Afro- American Women’s Childbirth and Slavery, Suffrage Movements and Women’s Writing, The Harlem Renaissance’, part three ‘Modernist Writers’, which speaks of, Black Movement in Twentieth Century, and Contemporary Women Colour World’, and part four ‘Characteristics of the Novels of Afro- American and European American’, which deals with ‘Contemporary Black Feminist Writers’; Chapter III is, ‘Female Authorship and Women’s Issues’, which includes as part one ‘Female Authorship, Women’s Issues in the West, the Women’s Issues in Postmodernism’, part two ‘Toni Morrison’s Authorship’, which talks about Morrison’s View on African Heritage and the Place of Black Literature in the US, The Importance of Language and Writing for Morrison, Morrison and Ideologies, Black Women vs. White Women and the

Shortcomings of Feminism, Morrison’s Female Characters and Concerns, and Morrison and Postmodernism’, and part three ‘A Review of Author and Theoretical Frameworks’, which speaks of ‘The Author and Theoretical Frameworks, The Feminist Theory, and The Postmodern Theory’; Chapter IV is, ‘ A Critical Analysis of Novels’, which includes The Bluest Eye, Sula and Song of Solomon. These novels tell a simple story but behind the simplicity lies grave and complex issues about black and white race relations. Racism is the feeling of inherent superiority of one race over another. Though racism as an ideology no more holds power, the implicit notion of the inherent inferiority of blacks has survived long enough to perpetuate the justness of power and privilege of white over the blacks. The various institutions of the society, political, legal, cultural, educational manifest this domination.

Chapter V is, ‘A Critical Analysis of Novels’, which includes Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz. These three novels of Morrison present a shift of her vision from the Black woman’s world to that of the Black man. Here Morrison continues to dwell on the theme of quest as she focuses on the Black man’s search for the achievement of his black self.

And Chapter VI is, ‘Conclusion’, which draws up on the findings of the previous chapters. It presents the findings of the interpretation of the selected novels written by Morrison in terms of the research topic and the related themes. The chapter will sum up the core points of the study.

This research can be considered to be immensely useful for a dynamic and healthy social order. It is society-oriented and has a social bearing. It is a determined effort of the human’s urge to read in between the lines of human being with the social, political, economic and cultural aspects. It is obliged to promote better social understanding. The research work provides the means towards the solution to problems. It brings out that every human problem has a human answer. Moreover, no human problem can be solved without human touch. It is a unique exploration, a thoughtful analysis of human mind.

The present research work could be useful in guiding the social policies and planning. It brings forth new social orders and human relations. It is an experience- oriented work. The work tries to display the artistic vision as well as affirmative values of life against the backdrop of grim reality.

Works Cited

A Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Moderism, Mass, Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 1986. P. 141.

Bethel, Lorraine. This Infinity of Conscious Pain: Zora Neale Hurston and Black Female Literary Tradition. 1982. Print.

Brent, Linda. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The Classic Slave Narratives. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: American Library, 1987. Print.

Hassan I. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards A Postmodern Literature. Second Edition. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 1982. P. 260.

Learner, Gerda. Black Women in White America. New York: New American Library, 1969, Print.

Mishra, Lata Toni Morrison’s Paradise: A Trauma Narrative. Re-Markings, Vol. 9, No. 2, Sept. 2010, Print.

Pratima. Alienation and Affairmation in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Re- Markings. Vol 8, N0.2 Sept. 2009. Print.

CHAPTER - 2

Life and Writing Career of Toni Morrison and Black Feminism

Chapter II

Life and Writing Career of Toni Morrison and Black Feminism

The approach of this thesis is an analytical method applied at two levels. On one hand, the study explores and analyzes Toni Morrison’s novels, in terms of the way how the writings of colored women differ from and at times strike back at white feminism. On the other hand, it researches upon the popular women novelists to show the variation of black feminism as characterized by Toni Morrison who responds differently to her common sexist and racist context.

Toni Morrison is an Afro- American literary giant of the 1980s and 1990s. In her works, she has explored the experience and roles of black women in a racist and male dominated society. In the centre of her complex and multilayered narratives, there is unique cultural inheritance of Afro-Americans. Her works also show the influence of Afro-American folklore, songs and women’s gossip. In her attempts to map these oral art forms onto literary modes of representation, Morrison has created a body of work formed by a distinctly black sensibility while drawing a reading audience from across racial boundaries. “Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin [?] What it is to have no home in this place To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.” (Nobel Lecture, 7 Dec. 1993)

Indeed, in her Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm, she eloquently demonstrated the visionary force and poetic import of her novels which reflect her worldview and understanding of how language shapes human reality. Through her own use of the spoken and written word, she has created new spaces for readers, to bring their imagination and their intellect to the complex, cultural, political, social and historical issues of our time. Moreover, through her work as an editor and novelist, she has made it possible for the texts of both Afro- American and feminist writers to reshape the contours of what we call American literature.

Morrison’s novels are characterized by carefully crafted prose in which ordinary words are placed in relief, so as to produce lyrical phrases and to elicit sharp emotional responses from her readers. Her extraordinary, mythical characters are

driven by their own moral visions to struggle, in order to understand truths which are larger than those held by the individual self. Her themes are broad: good and evil, love and hate, friendship, beauty and ugliness, and death.

Toni Morrison’s novels reflect her desire to draw on the people, places, language, values, cultural traditions and politics that have shaped her own life and that of Afro-American people. In doing so, she offers no solutions to the problems, nor does she simplify the complex realities of the past or present. Instead, out of respect for the cultural knowledge that black people bring to life and living, she uses the power and majesty of her imagination to address them and almost everyone is interested in her stories that have created a permanent place for her among America’s greatest writers.

1. Life and Writing Career

1.1 Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s original name was Chloe Anthony Wofford, who was born as the second of four children to George and Ramah Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, USA. Both her parents came from sharecropping families who had moved to the North to escape racism and to find better opportunities in the North, in the early 1900s. She grew up in a lively household and was surrounded by songs, fairy tales, ghost stories, myths, music and the language of their Afro-American heritage. A common practice in her family was storytelling; after the adults had shared their stories, the children told their own. The importance of both listening to stories and creating them contributed to Morrison’s profound love of reading.

Morrison’s parents encouraged her passion for reading, learning and culture, as well as instil confidence in her own abilities and attributes as a woman. The Woffords were proud of their heritage. While Toni Morrison has led an influential life of her own, two people influenced her outlook on the world a great deal. First, her grandmother, who left her home in the South with seven children at the age of thirty, in fear of sexual violence against her maturing daughters, then, her mother, who worked embarrassing jobs in order to help Morrison go through college and graduate.

In 1949, Morrison entered Howard University to study English. Since many people couldn’t pronounce her first name correctly, she changed it to Toni, a

shortened version of her middle name. She joined a repertory company, the Howard University Players, with whom she made several tours to the South. She was exposed to the lives of the blacks there. Morrison received a BA in English in 1953 and then obtained a Master of Arts in English from Cornell University in 1955, for which she wrote a thesis on “Suicide in the Works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.” After graduation, Morrison became an English instructor at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas. (from 1955-57) In 1957 she returned to Howard University as a member of the faculty. (Beaulieu 2003) This was a time of civil rights movement and she met several people who were later active in the struggle.

Toni married a young Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison in 1958 and divorced him in 1964, moving with their two sons to Lorain, Ohio and then to New York where she went to work as a senior editor at Random House. She also began sending her own novels to publishers.

Morrison was a member of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University, who met to discuss their work. She went to one such meeting with a short story about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. The story later evolved into her first novel, The Bluest Eye. (1970)

Pecola Breedlove, the central character, believes everything would be all right if only she had beautiful blue eyes. The narrator, Claudia MacTeer, tries to understand the destruction of Pecola. In 2000 it was chosen as a selection for Oprah’s Book Club. In 1973 Morrison’s second novel Sula was published; the novel depicted two black women friends and their community of Medallion, Ohio. It follows the lives of Sula, a free spirit, who is considered a threat against the community and her cherished friend, Nel, from their childhood to maturity and to death. This novel focuses mainly on the struggles of womanhood as faced by Afro-American women within their own communities and white communities as well.

This novel was nominated for the National Book Award. From 1976-1977, Morrison was a visiting lecturer at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), brought to her national attention. The book was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. This time she focused on strong black male characters. Written from a male point of view, the story dealt with Milkman Dead’s efforts to recover his “ancient properties,” a cache of gold.

Morrison’s insight into the male world came from watching her sons. It won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award.

At its 1979 commencement ceremonies, Barnard College awarded her its highest honour, the Barnard Medal of Distinction. In 1981 she published her fourth novel, Tar Baby, where she explored the interaction between black and white societies. The same year Morrison became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Morrison was named the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at the State University of New York in Albany in 1984. While living in Albany, she started writing her first play, Dreaming Emmett. It was based on a true story of a black teenager, Emmett Till, killed by racist whites in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman. The play premiered January 4, 1986 at the Marketplace Theatre in Albany. Morrison’s next novel, Beloved (1987), was influenced by a published story about a slave, Margaret Garner, who in 1851 escaped with her children to Ohio from her master in Kentucky. When she was about to be re-captured, she tried to kill her children rather than return them to a life of slavery.

In 1988, Toni Morrison was named Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University. She became the first black woman writer to hold a named chair at an Ivy League University. She taught creative writing and also took part in the Afro- American studies, American studies and Women’s studies programs. While giving a lecture at Princeton, Morrison was asked by a student “who she wrote for.” She swiftly replied that she wanted to write for people like her, which is to say black people, curious people and demanding people—people who can’t be faked, people who don’t need to be patronized, people who have very, very high criteria. She also started her next novel, Jazz, about life in the 1920s.

The book was published in 1992. In Jazz, Joe, the unfaithful husband of Violet kills Dorcas in a fit of passion. The fragmented narrative follows the causes and consequences of the murder. The sounds in Jazz—a ticking clock or a hand tapping a leg—tied the novel to jazz music and remind readers that while Morrison acknowledged her foremothers, as well as white writers such as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, she was also engaged in constant dialogue with her male counterparts, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray and others.

The narrative’s point of view and characterization in Jazz work together, so that multiple voices, past and present, tell their individual as well as collective histories and the city itself becomes a character, as the porch does in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. In 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was the eighth woman and the first black woman to win it.

Shortly afterwards, a fire destroyed Rockland County, Morrison’s New York home. In 1998, Morrison published her next novel, Paradise, which takes place in an all-black town called Ruby and describes a violent attack that a group of men make on a small, all-female community at the edge of town. “The book coalesced around the idea of where paradise is, who belongs in it,” Morrison said in an interview The New York Times. (8 January 1998) “All paradises are described as male enclaves, while the interloper is a woman, defenceless and threatening. When we get ourselves together and get powerful is, when we are assaulted.”

After 1999, Toni Morrison also published a number of children’s books with her son, Slade Morrison who works as a painter and musician and from 1992, lyrics for music by Andre Previn and Richard Danielpour. The Big Box was published in 2002. In this book, Morrison does say that parents should not be strict with their children, but rather that parents should let their children explore sometimes because that is the one way to learn. In 2003 she published Love, describing life and love during the 1940s and 1950s on a black seaside resort. It portrays Bill Cosey, a charismatic hotel owner, dead for many years but not forgotten, and two women, his widow and his granddaughter, who live in his mansion. Morrison continued to revise the notion of utopia as articulated by Sir Thomas More, the sixteenth-century Catholic martyr and by subsequent American writers. Paradise and Love show that

Morrison remains attentive to the past, which she believes is infinite, without losing sight of the living, existing communities with which her literature is ultimately

concerned.

Oxford University awarded Morrison an honorary Doctor of Letters in June 2005. In November 2006, Morrison visited the Louvre Museum in Paris as the second in its “Grand Invite” program to guest-curate a month-long series of events across the arts on the theme of “The Foreigner’s Home.” A Mercy was published in 2008. The other works by Toni Morrison areas follow: Imagination (1981), Playing in the Dark

(1993), “This Amazing, Troubling Book” (article 1999), The Book of Mean People (2002), Who’s Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? (Co-author Slade Morrison 2003), Who’s Got Game? Poppy or the Snake? (Co- author Slade Morrison 2004), Remember: The Journey to School Integration (2004), Margaret Garner (Libretto, first performed in 2005), Who’s Got Game? The Mirror or the Glass? (Co- author Slade Morrison 2007) Morrison currently holds a place on the editorial board of The Nation magazine. She is also a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters as well as an active member in the National Council on the Arts. Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison does not identify her works as feminist. She has stated that she thinks “it’s off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I’m involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don’t subscribe to patriarchy and I don’t think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it’s a question of equitable access and opening doors to all sorts of things.” (qtd. in Jaffrey)

Morrison feels deeply the losses which Afro-Americans experienced in their migration from the rural South to the urban North, from 1930 to 1950. They lost their sense of community, their connection to their past and their culture. To have roots is to have a shared history. The individual who does not belong to any community is generally lost. The lack of roots and the disconnection from the community and the past, cause individuals to become alienated; often her characters struggle unsuccessfully to identify, let alone fulfill an essential self. Morrison believes that the presence of the ancestors is one of the characteristics of black writing. Ancestors are necessary for they provide cultural information, connection with the past; they protect and instruct.

In her novels, Morrison focuses on the experience of black Americans, particularly emphasizing black women’s experiences in an unjust society and the search for cultural identity. She uses fantasy and mythic elements along with realistic depiction of racial, gender and class conflict. Her family talked about their dreams in the same way as they talked about things that really happened and they accepted visitations as real. Morrison’s style combines these unrealistic elements with a realistic presentation of life and characters. This has often been labelled “Magical Realism.” Initially she objected to the label “Magical Realism,” feeling it diminished her work or even dismissed it. Later, however, she acknowledged that it does identify

the supernatural and unrealistic elements in her writing. In The Bluest Eye the magic appears in the failure of marigolds to bloom and the belief by some members of the community in Soaphead Church’s powers.

2. Feminism

Feminist critics claim that earlier criticism has been male-dominated and must be redone to include the feminine consciousness, even if necessary, to the extent of reshaping systems of values. Some feminist critics argue that to be good, both criticism and literature itself must move beyond both sexes into an androgynous point of view. Globally, women are frequent victims of violence and oppression; they are often treated as property or as sources of pleasure for men.

In many countries, rape and sexual violence are practised as displays of supremacy. Early feminists blamed men for all the restrictions of women’s role and argued that the relationship between the sexes was one-sided, controlling and oppressive. Some works that have a place in the writings of feminist critics date the 1960s as the beginning of feminism and one particularly important name is from considerably earlier: Virginia Wolf [especially A Room of One’s Own (1929)]. However, the clear rise of the feminist critical movement begins in the early 1970s. The emphasis on the 1970s is evident in the citations provided by Annis V. Pratt in “The New Feminist Criticisms: Exploring the History of the New Space.” Recent critical works are Sydney Janet Kaplan’s Feminine Consciousness in the Modern British Novel, Judith Fryser’s The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, Ellen Moers’s Literary Women, Arlyn Diamond and Lee Edwards’s The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism and Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing.

The notion that the new movement in feminist criticism will develop ultimately not a new feminine vision, but an androgynous vision may be one of the helpful correctives to come out of the movement. In its simplest form, the call for androgyny is found in comments like that of Josephine C. Donovan, when she states that a “feminine aesthetic will provide for the integration into the critical process of the experiences denoted as ‘feminine’ in our culture.” (79) In this context, because her assumption is that our culture has been male-oriented, this would be a movement toward an integration of male and female aesthetic and sensibilities and consequently, an enrichment of our culture, perhaps even its salvation.

2.1 Afro-American Feminism and Literary History

The primary expressions of Black Feminism in the United States are marked by three distinct periods or waves that are directly connected to and grew out of key movements in Afro- American history: The Abolitionist Movement, which culminated with the suffragists’ securing passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, in 1919; The Modern Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, which peaked with the enforcement, during the 1970s, of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and The Post–Civil Rights Era that helped to usher in the professionalization and institutionalization of feminisms.

First-wave feminism refers to a period of feminist activity during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the United States. It focused on inequalities, primarily on gaining the right of women’s suffrage. The end of first- wave feminism is often linked with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, (1919) granting women the right to vote. This was a major victory of the movement which also included reforms in higher education, in the workplace and professions and in healthcare. Second-wave feminism refers to a period of feminist activity which began during the early 1960s and lasted through the late 1980s. The movement encouraged women to understand aspects of their own personal lives as deeply politicized and reflective of a sexist structure of power. If First-wave feminism focused upon absolute rights such as suffrage, Second-wave feminism was largely concerned with other issues of equality, such as the end to discrimination and oppression. Third-wave feminism deals with issues that seem to limit or oppress women. The roots of the Third-wave began in the mid-1980s. Consciousness raising activism and widespread education are often the first steps that feminists take toward social change. Issues of race, class and sexuality are central to third-wave feminism. Third-wave feminists work to educate and work with women across political borders, to give them the tools and awareness to make their own decisions.

Black Feminism is the process of self-conscious struggle that empowers women and men to realize a humanistic vision of community. Afro-American women’s experiences with work and family during slavery and after emancipation led them to develop a specific perspective on the relationships between multiple types of

oppression. Black women experienced not just racism, but sexism and other forms of oppression. This struggle fostered a broader, more humanistic view of community that encouraged each person to develop his or her own individual, unique human potential. Such a community is based on notions of fairness, equality and justice for all human beings, not just for Afro-American women. Black feminism encompasses a comprehensive, anti-sexist, anti-racist and anti-elitist perspective on social change.

The legacy of struggle, the search for voice, the interdependence of thought and action and the significance of empowerment in everyday life are core themes in Black Feminism. The legacy of struggle against racism and sexism is a common thread binding Afro-American women regardless of historical era, age, social class or sexual orientation. The struggle against racism and its resulting humanistic vision differentiates black feminism from historical expressions of white feminism in the United States. Black feminists’ central concern has been the transformation of societal relations based on race, class and gender.

The search for voice or the refusal of black women to remain silent constitutes a second core theme of black feminism. In order to exploit black women, dominant groups have developed controlling and stereotyping images by claiming that black women are inferior.

Because they justify black women’s oppression, four interrelated controlling images of black women—the mammy, the matriarch, the welfare mother and the jezebel—reflect the dominant group’s interest in maintaining black women’s subordination. Challenging these stereotypes has been an essential part of the search for voice. For Afro-American women, the search for voice emerges from the struggle to reject controlling images and embrace knowledge essential to their survival.

The theme of the interdependence of thought and action stresses the connections between black women’s ideas and their actions. It is this interrelationship between thought and action that allows black women to see the connections among concrete experiences with oppression, to develop a self-defined voice concerning those experiences and to enact the resistance that entails.

Black feminism cannot challenge race, gender and class oppression without empowering black women to become pro-active. Black feminist thought sees black

women’s oppression and their resistance to oppression as inextricably linked. Thus, oppression responds to human action. The very existence of black feminism suggests that black women always have a choice and the power to act, no matter how bleak a situation may appear to be. It also shows that although the empowerment of black women is important, only collective action can effectively eradicate long- standing political, social and economic inequalities.

The 1980s and 1990s saw a major growth in black feminist writers. They let their voices be heard in published works and in academia. They critiqued gender, white male supremacist patriarchy and other structures of domination. The Black Feminist Movement grew out of and in response to the Black Liberation Movement and the Women’s Movement. In an effort to meet the needs of black women who felt they were being racially oppressed in the Women’s Movement and sexually oppressed in the Black Liberation Movement, the Black Feminist Movement emerged.

All too often, “black” was merely equated with black men and “woman” was equated with white women. As a result, black women were an invisible group whose existence and needs were ignored. The Feminist Movement focused on the problems faced by white women. For instance, earning the power to work outside of the home was not an accomplishment for black feminists; they had been working all along. The purpose of the movement was to develop theory which could adequately address the way race, gender and class were interconnected in their lives and to take action to stop racist, sexist and class discrimination.

2.1.1 Language and The Abolitionist Movement

Afro-American English is essentially as old as any variety of speech in North America. However, that Afro-American English is a variety of English influenced by African languages during the colonial period, rather than a language developed primarily from African languages and later influenced by American English. There is little evidence of African languages spoken during the colonial period. As a result, historical connections among African languages, Afro- American speech and mainstream American English are difficult to prove. The only thing an enslaved African could carry across the Atlantic Ocean was his culture, of which language was a significant component. The linguistic situations of slaves imported directly from

Africa and those imported from the West Indies were quite different and the difference played a role in the variety and development of Afro-American speech.

Although black Americans responded to their enslavement and the denial of their humanity in a number of ways, the emergence of Afro-American literature reflects the centrality of writing to the project of seeking freedom and equality in the United States. At first, because of the European Enlightenment’s stress on writing as the most visible sign of the ability to reason, literature presented a way for Africans in America to prove their humanity and demonstrate a capacity for artistic creation and imaginative thought. Later, literature developed into a vehicle through which Afro- Americans could voice not only their rejection of slavery and institutionalized racism, but also their desire for freedom and recognition as full citizens of the United States.

The American Revolution reinforced Enlightenment ideas about the importance of written communication, reading, writing and print were increasingly seen as technologies of power. The fact that the country had formed itself through one written document, the Declaration of Independence and negotiated the terms of its existence through another, the constitution, caused writing and publication to become associated with legitimacy in the new nation. In this environment the ability to read and write took on special significance: it became a marker for citizenship.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, free blacks living in urban areas of the North used writing to highlight the disparity between the condition of people of African descent in the USA and the republican principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence. The writers used literature not only to call for the abolition of slavery in the United States, but also to point out the particular needs of the free black population and to voice their demands for full citizenship and equal participation in the life of the republic. In the late 1820s and throughout the 1830s free blacks crafted and distributed literature that was intended to combat charges of racial inferiority, validate their calls for social justice and alert their audience to the disparity between American ideals and racial inequality.

One impediment to studying the poetry and prose that appears in the earliest black newspapers and the abolitionist press is that much of it was published anonymously. As the unsigned broadsides and pamphlets of the Revolutionary era illustrate, recognition of individual authorship was not a priority in the early USA.

Furthermore, anonymity and the use of pen names often provided a degree of protection that allowed black writers to speak their minds more freely. This was especially true for black women. Socially imposed constraints of both race and gender would have prohibited black women from engaging in public and political discussion.

2.1.2 Slave Narratives

Slave narratives are autobiographical accounts of the physical and spiritual journey from slavery to freedom. Following the prefatory material, the narratives almost always begin with the phrase, “I was born.” Then, in contrast with the conventions of white autobiography, the slave narrator emphasizes how slavery has denied him specific knowledge of his birth and parentage. The slave narrator goes on to describe the precarious and dehumanizing aspects of slavery, including scenes where slaves are brutally beaten, sold at auction and separated from family members. The antebellum slave narrative moves from south to north, from rural to urban and from slavery to freedom. During a phenomenon known as the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of black Americans moved from an economically depressed rural South to industrial cities of the North to take advantage of the employment opportunities created by World War I.

The antebellum slave narratives are episodic in structure, melodramatic in tone and didactic in their appeal to commonly held moral values. Slave narrators appealed to the religious and secular values of their white audiences, arguing that slavery dehumanized the masters as well as degraded the slaves. They often noted that the most fervently religious masters were the most brutal. Similarly, the slave narrative appealed to the national values of liberty and equality as stated in the Declaration of Independence. The direct link between literacy and freedom is a thematic matrix that occurs in all of the major antebellum narratives as well. By the nineteenth century, it was generally illegal and was believed to be dangerous to teach a slave to read and write. In the classic slave narrative, the acquisition of literacy is the precondition for the slave’s decision to revolt against his enslavement and literacy becomes the first step toward mental as well as physical freedom.

All slave narratives shared some common characteristics that became fundamental features of slave storytelling, whether orally transmitted or written and printed. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. put it:

Literary works configure into a tradition not because of some mystical collective unconscious determined by the biology of race or gender, but because writers read other writers and based their representations of experience on models of language provided largely by other writers to whom they felt akin. It is through this mode of literary revision, amply evident in the texts themselves, in formal echoes, recast metaphors, even in parody, that a “tradition” emerges and defines itself. (qtd in Andrews : xviii)

Frederick Douglass’s Narrative is best known for the association it makes between literacy and freedom. While living in Baltimore, eight-year-old Douglass learned the basics of reading and writing from Sophia Auld. The lessons marked the beginning of the end of his life as a slave, even though they were short-lived. When Sophia’s husband and Douglass’s master, Hugh Auld, discovered what Sophia was doing he ordered her to stop, claiming that literacy would make the young Douglass unfit for slavery. The moment Hugh Auld made that command, however, Douglass became all the more determined to master reading and writing.

Through years of dedicated effort Douglass, the representative self-made man, became a genius of the English language—an orator, writer and thinker known throughout the world. For Douglass, learning to read was a decisively political act; literacy was, in his words, “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” Language was important in Douglass’s autobiography because literacy was tied to eighteenth- century Enlightenment beliefs that to be fully human meant having the capacity to read and write.

Afro-Americans were denied literacy because the founding premise of and justification for slavery was that Africans were not human and, thus fit for bondage. As a result, the classic slave narratives, which appeared as early as the end of the eighteenth century, employed language as a means of refuting racist stereotypes designed to obliterate the humanity of Africans enslaved in the Americas. These narratives, of which Douglass’s 1845 Narrative is a clear example, emphasize the acquisition of language to demonstrate the humanity as well as the morality of the slave narrator. Throughout his Narrative, Douglass shows that he is a moral man suffering from the evils of others. The slave narratives confront and refute the belief that slaves were inhuman. The authenticating documents and author portraits that accompany the narratives of former slaves testify to the humanity of the authors—real

33 people with names and histories, as opposed to nameless chattel.

It is argued that Afro-American slaves were unique in the history of world slavery because they were the only enslaved people to produce a body of writing that testified to their experiences. For many of these authors, writing narratives served a dual purpose:

it was a way of publicizing the horrors they had gone through and it was also a method of proving their humanity. One of the common arguments in support of race-based slavery was that blacks were simply an inferior species, incapable of thinking and feeling in the ways whites did. Thus, slave authors were able to display their emotions and their intellects through their narratives.

According to Toni Morrison, slave narratives are both instructive and representative— characteristics that privilege memory (external, verifiable reality) over imagination (personal ruminations). Memory in the slave narrative presents the reader with the past events and facts of slavery; memory itself is rarely the subject of the slave narrative. If the former-slave-turned writer doubted his or her remembrances of slavery, then pro-slavery advocates were likely to dismiss the narrative as a falsification rather than an authentication of the writer’s existence.

Therefore, to authenticate his or her existence beyond doubt, the writer of a slave narrative had to strike an objective rhetorical stance. In terms of rhetoric, slave narratives reflect a delicate balance between outrage and controlled prose. In narrating events “as they really were,” slave authors tend to focus more on slavery, as institution and external reality, than on their particular individual life, which is internal and subjective—thus accounting for the sameness across individual slave narratives.

At the conclusion of Beloved, Morrison sums up her retelling of one slave family’s experience: “It was not a story to pass on.” There are certainly logical reasons why the story of slavery might never have been passed on. One, the reason Morrison suggests, was its sheer horror and trauma—those who lived through it may not have wanted to remember their experiences. The second reason is more practical, it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write, which meant that the act of putting a story on paper was generally prohibited to them. But neither of these reasons kept

former slaves from passing on their stories and leaving a record about what living as a piece of property had been like. These slave narratives set the standard for the tradition of Afro-American autobiography that continues today.

2.1.3 Women’s Slavery

The development of a distinctly feminist consciousness began during the era of slavery. Slave codes defined black folks as chattel, thereby allowing the “owners” of their bodies to deny them the rights and privileges of citizenship, to physically exploit their labour and to abuse them. As legal “property,” enslaved women were constantly confronted with sexual abuse and lacked even the limited legal recourse enjoyed by their “free” counterparts. Like their enslaved sisters, “free” women could not escape the harmful consequences of these myths, and as abolitionists, they organized simultaneously against slavery as a legal institution and racially gendered sexual oppression.

The abolitionist and liberal reformer, Sojourner Truth, is rightly celebrated as the fountainhead of black feminist thinking in the nineteenth century. Slave status, she preached, denied black women motherhood, protection from exploitation and their innate feminine qualities. Truth’s biblical-based feminism, charged by her riveting personal testimony, called attention to the way slavery stranded black women on the periphery of “becoming a woman.” Although, Truth was not the only black woman of her era—others included Jarena Lee and Marie Stewart—to advocate for women’s rights through an appeal to the Bible, she was often the lonely black voice among a chorus of prominent white feminists. As a pioneering black feminist, Truth’s voice was most influential to contemporary feminists.

The other most noted black woman of the nineteenth century, Harriet Tubman, was the genuine embodiment of a revolutionary abolitionist’s black feminist spirit. Challenging the exploitative system of slavery from the inside, Tubman worked over the course of her life to free herself and many others. Called “Moses” by all who loved and respected her, Tubman’s refusal to be complacent in her own subjugation demonstrates a core feature of black feminism. As a zealous abolitionist, Tubman’s mode of action was linked to a political movement and culture that was in opposition to the violent world and racist discourses that elite southern plantation owners had created to rationalize the institution of slavery. Slave narratives written by

women occupy a special place in the long history of antebellum slave narration because female slaves suffered additional burdens based on gender.

Those qualities of beauty and femininity long honoured in all cultures became a special curse for the female slave, because these attributes often led to sexual abuse by slave owners, overseers and male slaves. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by the emancipated slave, Harriet A. Jacobs, and published in 1861, underscores different uses of literacy by male and female slaves. Through the pseudonym and character of Linda Brent, Jacobs’s narrative outlines the particular injustices faced by enslaved black women as well as their strategies of resistance.

Slave narratives, particularly those authored by women, are the life accounts of victims, tales of unendurable suffering and torment that alert the reader to a counterculture present in America. The slave-narrator Olaudah Equiano incorporated dramatic episodes of the mistreatment of women slaves into his work as evidence of the especially brutal treatment they had endured. He describes it thus:

When I came into the room . . . I was very much affrighted at some things I saw and the more so as I had seen a black woman slave as I came through the house, who was cooking the dinner and the poor creature was cruelly loaded with various kinds of iron machines; she had one particularly on her head, which locked her mouth so fast that she could scarcely speak; and could not eat nor drink. I was much astonished and shocked at this contrivance, which I afterwards learned was called the iron muzzle. (764)

2.1.4 Afro-American Women’s Childbirth and Slavery African gender systems emphasized the importance of motherhood and fertility to women’s social identity and family lineage. Captivity by slave traders brought African social institutions of childbirth into a collision with slavery’s alienating objectification of black women’s reproduction. Parched, hungry, terrified and often raped by guards and sailors, some African women conceived in the midst of the forced passage from the African hinterlands across the Atlantic. Some miscarried on slave ships, while others gave birth in shackles, only to see their vulnerable infants succumb to disease and deprivation. Survivors of the Middle Passage passed on to their descendants what they knew of indigenous birth rituals and midwifery techniques as they remade black cultures and communities in the Americas. As William Andrews observes:

. . . [T]he slave mother, or some comparable black maternal figure, more than the female narrator herself, plays the hero’s role in most early black women’s autobiographies. The mother inspires within her daughter the hope of freedom and provides an example of a woman who will not give in to despair. Sometimes the mother furnishes material as well as moral assistance to her daughter when she strikes for freedom. (xxx)

Early in the development of America’s slave codes, seventeenth-century colonial lawmakers established a system of inherited and perpetual slavery that determined a child’s slave or free status according to the condition of the mother. All children of enslaved mothers were, thus by law also enslaved and were treated as the property of their mother’s owner. Slave birth meant wealth for the slave owner. Occasionally, an enslaved woman deliberately ended the life of her newborn rather than raise the child under slavery. Antebellum evidence for both abortion and infanticide is difficult to come by and complicated by planters who blamed slave women for miscarriages and stillbirths that may instead have been brought on by poor health and harsh labour. Furthermore, infanticide, as Toni Morrison conveyed in her novel Beloved, often carried heavy spiritual and psychological costs for enslaved mothers.

2.1.5 Suffrage Movement and Women’s Writing

With the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment securing the right to vote for black men, a distinct woman’s suffrage movement emerged that culminated in the years 1890–1920. Black women endeavoured to pursue the right to vote at a time when white men and women alike sought to exclude them from it. This was a time when legal segregation and the theatre of violence that surrounded public lynching kept Afro-Americans under siege and in “their place.” Despite the fact that white suffragists never hesitated to discuss how the vote could seal white supremacy, black feminists pressed for alliances with them. Refusing to desert the suffrage cause, black women organized voters’ leagues and clubs. They believed that black women needed the vote even more than did their white counterparts, because it would enable them to protect their inalienable rights and improve their schools and conditions as wage labourers.

Although Afro-Americans were officially free in the period just after the Civil War known as Reconstruction, the times were not conducive to their literary efforts. Slavery had been abolished, but the place and position of the newly freed slaves and those Afro-Americans who had been free before the Civil War had not been determined. Paradoxically, the dissolution of the promises of Reconstruction marked a significant revival in the production of black literature and literary activity in the black community. At the end of the nineteenth century personal testimonies continued to be powerful tools through which to share the trials and triumphs of black life. Up from Slavery (1901) by Booker T. Washington is the classic example of this type of narrative.

During the Progressive Era, roughly spanning 1890 to 1920, the American woman struggled to change the definition of womanhood in profound ways. At issue was the right to vote, to wear bloomers, to be free from corseting, to work outside the home and to have a place in the world beyond the domestic sphere. By 1900 the “new woman” had emerged; these modern women were attending college, getting jobs, agitating for the right to vote, rejecting traditional domesticity, proudly asserting themselves in public and in general, becoming an integral part of American popular culture and invading its literature as well. At the end of the nineteenth century, writers such as Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were already writing about women seeking lives outside traditional feminine norms.

The suffrage movement and the involvement of women in surrounding political movements such as socialism and the temperance movement inspired a particular genre of writing that included both creative and political texts which examined the issues and problems facing women at the turn of the century. Through the genres of regionalism and realism, women writers concentrated on the domestic details of women’s lives in order to explore the powerful relationship between women’s development and the society that created them. In regionalism, women established a congruous and sometimes utopistic relationship with the land as their thoughts, feelings and struggles were reflected in the natural world around them. Heroines in realist novels were often set adrift in cityscapes, their fates tied to the whims of capitalism and patriarchal control. Women writers of regionalism and realism commonly used romantic and domestic plots to explicate not only women’s

38 position in the home, but in the world at large.

Writers of realism attempted to depict life in an objective manner and created stories that often focused on the details of everyday life. Edith Wharton’s novels concentrate on upper-class women confined by the expectations imposed on them by a materialistic and acquisitive society. In her novels The House of Mirth (1905), Custom of the Country (1913) and The Age of Innocence (1920), Wharton portrays wealthy New York City society and how, at the turn of the century, this society created a generation of women, indulged and sheltered, who are disconnected from the world beyond tea parties, balls and dressmakers. Wharton condemns the society for making these women ornamental and useless, while she simultaneously depicts them as sabotaging themselves through an acceptance of the definition of women as decorative objects.

2.1.6 The Harlem Renaissance Writers

Recent critical work by literary historians has revealed the extent to which the term Harlem Renaissance inaccurately describes the literary and cultural phenomenon that took place not only in the area of New York City called Harlem, but nationwide and to some extent, worldwide in the decade between 1919 and 1929. By the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of blacks, looking for better jobs and hoping for better race relations, had moved into major northern cities. New York and particularly Harlem were central to the movement. In part on the strength of newcomers who took part during the Great Migration of black people from the rural South to the urban North, Harlem in the 1920s fostered a sense of racial unity and pride. This environment inspired a new sense of confidence among Afro-American artists and gave rise to a boldly creative period in the history of Afro-American letters. Variously called the “race capital” and the “black cultural capital,” Harlem, was a place of great opportunity for blacks.

The writers of the Harlem Renaissance were determined to focus these lens on their unique experience of American life and culture. Afro-American writers’ work was charged with different issues than those that preoccupied white writers of the same period. Afro-American writers, though they experimented with narrative form and language like white modernists, were committed to using those techniques to explore black life and black issues. Additionally, a revision of narrative forms and of

language allowed black writers to capture the unique rhythms of black language and culture.

Women writers’ biggest contribution to the Harlem Renaissance came with fiction. Some of these writers, such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and Nella Larsen, wrote about the complexities of race and gender through the framework of the lives of everyday Afro-American women. The Great Depression and the rumblings of World War II signalled the end of modernism and of the Harlem Renaissance as cohesive literary movements. Although, modernists and the writers of the Harlem Renaissance sought to create languages and forms that delineated the modern experience, the world continued to change, necessitating new forms of literature and creating new genres of writing that reflected America’s changing relationship with the categories of race, gender, class and ethnicity.

3. Modernist Writers

The marketing of the American family as a perfect unit, began in the 1930s, after the heady 1920s and the beginning of the Great Depression. The promotion of family togetherness became a safety line, enabling Americans to pull through hard times. During World War II the family served as an important reminder of the perfection of American life and was set as a beacon of hope for “our boys” overseas. However, the 1950s were truly the golden age of the family. America, reborn after the scrimping and saving of World War II, was a shiny, plasticized, boomeranged and tail-finned world in which television and advertising packaged the perfect family alongside gelatine salads and pink refrigerators. Nevertheless, as this myth of familial perfection was being constructed, it was simultaneously being destroyed by women writers who resisted the lie of domesticity and the figurehead of the perfect housewife that stood in the centre of that lie. Writers and activists such as Jo Freeman, Nancy Chodorow, Casey Hayden, Mary King and Caroline Bird all brought the issues of women’s equality to the page, signalling that women were serious about ending the construction of woman as housewife. The literature of Afro-American women reflected a resistance not necessarily to suburban domesticity, but to a culture that often ignored them.

The feminist perspective approach applied to Morrison’s and Naylor’s novels is that of Nancy Chodorow, the founder of object relations theory. Chodorow’s

theory, unlike the Freudian and Lacanian feminists, socializes woman’s mothering roles; hence, it provides a space to make an inquiry into the racist and sexist environment in which Morrison’s and Naylor’s mother-figure live. The study shows the impacts of the society on the maternal roles of women. However, Chodorow’s theory is not without its own limitation. It lies in the fact that she sets woman’s maternity only in a hetero-normative angle. She ignores woman’s other relations which initially emanate from a mother-daughter relation. In other words, Chodorow’s theory overlooks woman- woman (lesbian or sisterly) relationship. This point itself contributes to the argument of the thesis regarding the differences between white and black feminism.

The research posits this argument and supports it with specific references to the female figures introduced by the two novelists in their works. In addition to this theory, the thesis also takes into its cognizance the well-known theorist, Luce Irigaray’s argument on the mother-daughter relation and sisterhood among women. Irigaray believes that all women have historically been associated with the role of “mother” such that, whether or not a woman is a mother, her identity is always defined according to that role.

The need to alter the mother/daughter relationship is a constant theme in Irigaray’s work:

“In our societies, the mother/daughter, daughter/mother relationship constitutes a highly explosive nucleus. Thinking it and changing it, is equivalent to shaking the foundations of the patriarchal order.” (Irigaray Reader 50)

Women’s social and political situation has to be addressed on a global level and that change begins in individual relationships between women. Women must fight for equal wages and against discrimination in employment and education.

Irigaray’s theories are those of a European, white middle-class academician and therefore, there would emerge some inconsistencies between her feminism and that of Morrison. Such inconsistencies help to argue on the black and white interface on the issue of feminism. This point should be well elaborated with textual analysis of the novels of Morrison.

The first decade of the twentieth century was marked by the tumult of technological and industrial innovation. Many Americans hailed these revolutions as the push the country needed to truly come alive as a nation. However, some American artists and writers saw a dark side to this mechanical modernity. For these writers the assembly line, mechanized industrial machinery and the ability to record and play back music and human voices, project images on a screen and traverse huge distances were the result of technological innovations that had the power to permanently disconnect human beings from each other.

Indeed, the era between the beginning of World War I in 1914 and the advent of World War II in 1939 has been termed the “Age of Anxiety.” The devastating repercussions of modern warfare employed during World War I left a generation of men overwhelmed with feelings of disillusionment, disappointment and uncertainty towards the world in general. Many women, in contrast, faced changes in the world

with enthusiasm.

The genre of writing deemed modernism emphasized a radical redefining of literary style, syntax and subject matter. Modernists sought to unhook language from its traditional meanings and definitions and to push the form of storytelling beyond its traditionally rigid constructions. Because, this new genre demolished traditional cultural hierarchies and artistic assumptions, it allowed women to rise to the fore of literary creation. Long left out of mainstream American culture, women writers anxiously embraced newly emerging forms of poetry and fiction as a way to best capture the unique experience of being a woman in modern America.

The stylistic innovations of modernism became the method through which, as the English writer Virginia Woolf expressed it, “a woman’s sentence” was contemplated. This woman’s sentence was not only created through the fresh construction of language, but also through newly discovered subjects. Modernist women wrote of lesbianism and sexual freedom while rejecting domesticity and in the process shattered all traditions in women’s writing. Modernist fiction freed the female character from operating only in this domestic sphere. No longer bound by its constraints, modernist women writers used the newly emerging literary forms to critique directly domesticity, traditional love relationships and the trap capitalism often set for the women who decided that being modern meant being a consumer.

Women writing modernist fiction pushed the genre of women’s fiction beyond previously established boundaries.

The change was not only in form, but also content. As women in American society were leading increasingly public lives, the size and shape of women’s worlds began to expand. Women’s writing reflected these expansions and writers captured these changes through challenging narratives and the use of inventive language.

Afro-American women at the turn of the twentieth century were also involved in writing about the world around them. Francis Harper’s novel, Iola Leroy (1892), delineates the Afro-American experience through the Civil War and Reconstruction. In 1900 Pauline E. Hopkins published Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. Though the novel’s framework is based on the traditional tropes of domestic and historical romance, Hopkins provides a startling account of bourgeois Afro-American life and offers the domestic drama, long the staple of white women writers, as a model of resistance to racism.

Morrison examined for her readers the condition of and the case for true Afro- American womanhood. She argued that the site of black womanhood was at the centre of the racially conscious family. This positioning of the black female subject was a direct response to popular ideas in white America about the black woman, who was portrayed variously as the ignorant but loving mammy to her white family, as the tragic mulatto cursed by her skin colour to loveless solitude and as the sexually profligate jezebel, morally corrupt and corrupting.

Gertrude Stein states in her book, Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), “In the nineteenth century men were confident, the women were not.” If Stein’s observation is accurate, then it is in the twentieth century in which women gained their confidence. As the writing in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century shows, women were no longer content to remain silent about their dissatisfaction with their roles in the world.

Political tracts and realistic renderings of New York City society often covertly express women’s desires for sexual equality, social recognition and self- determinism. As America inched closer to World War I, women writers became more experimental in style and subject, thus breaking the last tie to the nineteenth century’s long-suffering “angel of the house.”

The most common response by Afro-American women to sexism in the second wave of feminism, The Women’s Liberation Movement, was to hold the individuals who engaged in it personally accountable. In a point of departure from previous black feminists, black women at the end of the 1960s began to abandon the approach of individually and to form separate women’s organizations and meeting in “consciousness-raising” groups to address the problems of sexism.

As the twentieth century progresses, the voices of women become louder and more artistically innovative. Women of colour join the chorus, making American stories more vigorous, complex and inventive. In the twentieth century, women’s writing travels a course in which each generation of female characters progresses toward vital and independent lives, free from society’s traditional limitations. From Lily Bart’s death, hastened by her resistance to society’s marital expectations, in Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905) to Sethe’s escape from slavery into selfhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), women writing fiction in the twentieth century created textual reflections of women’s positions in American culture.

The search for voice and the refusal to be silenced pervade the words and actions of a range of women throughout this period. The refusal to be silenced was not confined to women in political movements. Zora Neale Hurston’s work, especially her widely read 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, aimed to give voice to black women’s thought through fiction. By placing black women’s issues in the centre of their work, other black women writers of this period—including Gwendolyn Brooks in Maud Martha (1953) and Lorraine Hansberry in A Raisin in the Sun (1959)—explored a black woman’s standpoint as something framed by both blackness and womanhood.

While the focus of many black writers at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance was on poetry, they increasingly turned their attention to fiction in the second half of the decade. The last few years of the 1960s and into the 1970s saw a literary market flooded with fiction by black women. The novels of the black women writers, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset, Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, George Schyler and Zora Neale Hurston addressed the limitations imposed by sexuality and class as well as race for their female protagonists. Like that of other female novelists of the time, Hurston’s daring exploration of black female selfhood

44 opened the way for black female writers of the 1970s and 1980s to explore the tangled web of race, sex and class in which black women struggled to know themselves.

3.1 Black Movements in Twentieth Century

The most significant socio-cultural events to influence the Afro-American novel during and since the 1960s were the Black Power Movement, the Black Arts Movement and Women’s Rights Movements, which contributed to the successful re- emergence of black women writers. The concept of Black Power expresses the determination of peoples of Sub-Saharan African descent to define and liberate themselves. In “The Black Arts Movement,” black aesthetician Larry Neal tells us that “Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America. In order to perform this task, the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique and iconology.” (1)

Because the concepts of Black Art and Black Power are related to the desire of Afro-Americans for self-determination, nationhood and solidarity with colonized people of the Third World, both are nationalistic. “One is concerned with the relationship between art and politics; the other with the art of politics,” says Neal. (5) Consequently, he contends, the most authentic writing of blacks during the 1960s was grounded in the lives of the black masses and “aimed at consolidating the Afro- American personality.”

The term Black Arts Movement refers to the historical period between 1960 and 1975 when Afro-American writers, artists, educators and intellectuals attempted to redefine black cultural identity in the United States by emphasizing the black aesthetic. Participants in the movement viewed the black aesthetic as a serious effort to produce literature or works of art and advance black cultural life through a system of beliefs and theories based on the political, economic, social and cultural history of blacks.

A central goal of the movement was to promote the creativity of black artists to the Afro-American community while basing their interpretations of the black

experience on an aesthetic observed from this same experience. The emergence of the Black Arts Movement should be seen—at least in part—as a challenge to the modern civil rights movement, as well as a challenge to white legal, social and cultural oppression. The difficulty was to reconstitute the Afro-American side of the dialectal relationship between the races through language, to have language explode into the conversation with the same impact as urban rioting.

We must acknowledge the longevity of race as an open issue in American civil discourse since the mid-1960s. “Civil Rights,” once the label for the struggle by blacks for political equality, remains in our lexicon, but now is taken as an umbrella under which the intersections of black and white civil, civic and cultural life are patrolled from both sides of the fence. Blacks and whites alike monitor the relationships between the races and make the state of the racial nation part of the ongoing national conversation. In large measure, this change came about because of the willingness of black Americans after World War II and then after Brown v. Board of Education to confront overt racism where they found it.

After 1955 black Americans were just as likely to go to jail for what they did in resistance to institutionalized racism as for who they were, which it was the more probable cause between the end of Reconstruction and World War II. By the mid- 1970s, with the effective withering away of the Black Arts Movement, Afro- American literature decentred its content, away from the preoccupations of the classic Afro-American narrative that had dominated black letters since the 1830s.

The social and political upheaval of the 1960s was accompanied by a change in the black literary and cultural movement. Seeking equal treatment in the USA, the black freedom movement of the 1960s looked to redefine how black people were seen and how they saw themselves. The writers of the Black Arts Movement wished to create politically engaging expression that would match the charged atmosphere of the period. They turned to the black community for inspiration and defined their goals in broadly collective political and social terms: rather than a movement focused on intellectual exchange between the black elite, the writers of the Black Arts Movement sought to communicate with the masses.

According to Addison Gayle, Jr., whose introduction to The Black Aesthetic (1972) serves as a critical and theoretical guide to the Black Arts Movement, the role

of the black artist was to “provide us with images based on our own lives.” (79) This new generation, represented by writers such as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Sonia Sanchez and Larry Neal, welcomed the fact that their work was not accepted by the mainstream. Larry Neal’s “The Black Arts Movement,” published in 1968, the year of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., served as a manifesto for these young writers. They were to look to their African ancestors as a source of inspiration, eschew white, middle-class values, create new themes and shape new forms.

3.2 Contemporary Colour Women World

Like black men, black women made major contributions to the Black Arts Movement. Their special concerns and experiences helped to focus community attention on the issues of racism, gender discrimination and class conflict. Many were committed to overcoming the historical oppression of women and to working toward an equal status with males in society. They also emphasized the development of the entire black community: men, women and children. The body of work produced by black women during the movement not only explored the perspectives of black women in the past and present, but also examined possibilities for the future.

By 1970 explicit discussions of sexuality had taken centre-stage in the women’s movement and black feminists’ efforts to sculpt organizational agendas to address their concerns were too often marginalized or interpreted as divisive. Sexism in the Black Power Movement and racism in The Women’s Liberation Movement pushed black feminists to organize independently.

One internal problem for the Black Arts Movement was the charge of misogyny. Some black women associated with the movement in the late 1960s argued that the insistence on “unity” within the movement led to an almost stifling uniformity as well. This was exacerbated by the connection of black cultural nationalism with black masculinity in the day-to-day interactions of the loose group of writers, as well as in their work. By the 1970s women influenced by the movement were ready to produce other versions of a black cultural resistance, although most stayed supportive of the agenda of the movement and of black men in general.

As black feminists experienced tensions with black men and white society at large, a cadre formed to found the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). When its first conference was held in November 1973, more than 250 women

attended. These women envisioned a multipurpose organization that would address an array of issues, ranging from employment and childcare concerns to sexuality, addiction and black women’s relations to each other and to the women’s movement. White women who attended the conference later wrote that they now saw that before they could build coalitions with black women, they would first need to prove that they were not racist. During the first wave of feminism, black suffragists struggled with the racism of white women, but the second wave required nonracist entry tickets that proved difficult for white women to produce. While white women and all men had access to the large assembly at the conference, they were not admitted into the workshops.

In turning its attention inward to the primacy of the black family and the problems of the black community, black power and black arts discourse subordinated the interests, needs and desires of black women to those of black men and of those of the individual to those of the group. The black masculinist aesthetic, sanctioned by the Black Power and Black Arts Movements, subordinated sexual politics to racial politics and privileged the cultural traditions of common black people. As a result, Afro-American women writers had to reconcile their racial double consciousness with the white middle-class feminist movement.

Facile generalizations about the parallels between the struggle of blacks and women for status ignore the complexity and distinctiveness of the history of black women, from the legacy of their African past and slave experience to their experience with industrialization and modern corporate America. As Toni Cade Bambara notes in her 1970 groundbreaking anthology, The Black Woman, a major question for black women of the 1960s and 1970s was how relevant the experiences, priorities, truths and discourses of white women are to the multiple consciousness of black women.

Subject to all the restrictions against blacks as well as those against women, the black woman is for many people, as black folk wisdom and Hurston reminds us, “de mule uh de world.” This means, among other things, that the reality of black womanhood is not dependent on black males first defining their manhood. Triple consciousness rather than double consciousness is frequently stressed by black feminists in their analysis of the interrelationship of race, class and sex in the identity formations of Afro-American women.

The fundamental distinguishing feature of contemporary black feminism is the self- conscious voicing of black feminist perspectives. Increasing social-class stratification among black women made more women available to think about and work on behalf of black feminist concerns. Black women graduated from high schools and colleges in record numbers and they were no longer placed exclusively in domestic service jobs. Afro-American women perceived that neither black organizations nor white feminist groups spoke fully for them. Thus, emerged the need to develop a distinctive black feminist agenda that built on the core themes long guiding black women’s actions yet simultaneously spoke to issues specific to Afro- American women.

4. Characteristics of the Novels of Afro-American and European American

The Afro-American novel is the product of social and cultural forces that shape the author’s attitude toward life and fuel the dialectical process between romantic and mimetic narrative impulses. In contrast to the European American novel, the Afro-American novel has its roots in the combined oral and literary traditions of Afro-American culture. Gates reminds us in The Signifying Monkey (1988), “the writing of black people in Western languages has, at all points, remained political, implicitly or explicitly, regardless of its intent or its subject.” (63)

One of the major differences about perceptions of the nature of reality, between American whites and blacks, centred on the designation of evil in the world. While most blacks satirized the sins of slavery and whites, most whites sentimentalized the slavery of sin and blacks.

In contrast to the search for innocence and the Adamic vision that inform the European American novel, the Manichaean drama of white versus black, the apocalyptic vision of a new world order and the quest to reconcile the double consciousness of Afro-American identity are inscribed in the texts of nineteenth and twentieth century Afro-American novels.

Thematically and structurally, the tradition of the Afro-American novel is dominated by the struggle for freedom from all forms of oppression and by the personal odyssey to realize the full potential of one’s complex bicultural identity as an Afro-American. This legendary and mythic journey— deriving its socio-cultural

consciousness from the group experience of black Americans and its mythopoetic force from the interplay of Eurocentric and Afrocentric symbolic systems—begins in physical or psychological bondage and ends in some ambiguous forms of deliverance or vision of a new world of mutual respect and justice for all peoples.

In short, insofar as there is an Afro- American canonical story, it is the quest, frequently with apocalyptic undertones, for freedom, literacy and wholeness— personal and communal—grounded in social reality and ritualized in symbolic acts of Afro-American speech, music and religion.

4.1 Contemporary Black Feminist Writers

The decade of the 1980s was an important time in which a growing number of black women writers and literary critics rigorously theorized about gender and black women as subjects in historical and contemporary contexts. Bell Hooks recognized the significance of black feminists such as Sojourner Truth, whose personal testimonies “validated” the need for a movement. Yet, Hooks encouraged black women to develop a theoretical framework to evaluate strategies and to challenge and change structures of domination.

Many noted black women poets and fiction writers—such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan and Audre Lorde— were political activists in “the movement” and participated in consciousness-raising liberation groups. Sketching out new ways of thinking about capitalism, sexism, identity formation and black cultures, their work has transformed the “individual” and has given black women multiple voices of inspiration as well as multiple visions of how things ought to be.

In essence, black feminists have overcome the academic binary of theory and practice by making use of all the methods—speeches, songs, written text and activism— previously employed by black women to re-read and re-interpret the intellectual, social, political, economic, legal and emotional worlds of black people.

With their unique perspectives on the intersection of race, sexuality and class within particular historical moments, the varieties of black feminism attest to the many ways black women have found to take a stand against sexism while remaining

50 in critical solidarity with other political discourses. In Black Women Writers at Work (1983), Bambara told the editor Claudia Tate:

What has changed about the women’s movement is the way we perceive it, the way black women define the term, the phenomena and our participation in it. . . . We are more inclined to trust our own traditions, whatever name we gave and now give those impulses, those groups, those agendas and are less inclined to think we have to sound like, build like, non-colored groups that identify themselves as feminist or as women’s rights groups or so it seems to me. (57)

This statement not only reveals the heart of the differences that many black women have about the priorities and objectives of the white women’s rights movement, but it also explains in part why Alice Walker adapted the term Womanist from black folk expression to signify a black feminist or feminist of colour, a woman who, among other things, is audaciously committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. More to the point of readings of contemporary Afro- American novels by black women, the above comments provide the necessary context for a better understanding of why black women are primarily concerned with how racism, sexism and class conflict have influenced the nature and function of love, power, autonomy, creativity, manhood and womanhood in the black family and community.

Close identification of “blackness” with masculinity angered some black women writers such that they sought to stake out a literary territory in which issues of gender could be examined. Unlike the “race women” writers of the early twentieth century whose literary job, as they saw it, was to defend the honour of black women and the lives of black men, Afro- American women writers entering the final quarter of the century wanted to redefine black womanhood and had little patience with men, black or white, who got in their way. These women were not “feminists” in the same way white women of the same generation were using the term in its “second” wave, nor did they lose sight of the centrality of race in their construction of a gendered reality.

As illustrated in their fiction, interviews in Black Women Writers at Work and the pioneer essays on Black Feminist Criticism by Barbara Smith and Deborah E. McDowell, many black women novelists deploy to a greater or lesser degree the

following signs and structures: motifs of interlocking racist, sexist and class oppression, black female protagonists, spiritual journey from victimization to the realization of personal autonomy or creativity, centrality of female bonding or networking, shared focus on personal relationships in the family and community, deeper, more detailed exploration and validation of the epistemological power of the emotions, iconography of women’s clothing, and black female language.

While agreeing with Smith that feminist criticism is “a valid and necessary cultural and political enterprise,” (46) McDowell questions the imprecision of the current definition of lesbianism by black feminists, the possible reductiveness of a lesbian aesthetic. McDowell advocates that black feminist critics combine a contextual approach with rigorous textual analysis, including a concern for the issue of gender-specific uses of language.

As contemporary Afro-American novelists attempt to displace personal ambivalence and social absurdity with a new order of thinking, feeling and sharing based on self-determination, community, human rights, most, such as John Oliver Killens, John A. Williams, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Terry McMillan and Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker, continue the tradition of social and critical realism.

Ann Shockley’s imaginative reconstruction of a transracial affair between women in Loving Her (1970) was probably the first contemporary black American lesbian novel. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), however, is the most celebrated Afro-American novel in which a lesbian relationship is central to the development of the narrative. Walker provides a contemporary black womanist’s vision of the lives of black Southerners in her novels: The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976) and The Temple of My Familiar (1989). The best of Walker’s novels is The Color Purple. Less compelling as critical realism than as folk romance, it is more concerned with the politics of sex than the politics of class and race.

Since the publication of Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a subtle treatment of black homosexuality and spiritual redemption and the sensitive, sympathetic examination of white gay relationships in Giovanni’s Room (1956), James Baldwin has been and remains the outstanding black gay novelist not only in modern and

contemporary Afro-American ,but also, for many readers, in Western literature. In black science fiction Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Estelle Butler are the major novelists.

Thematically and structurally, therefore, from Brown and Wilson to Reed, Morrison, Delany and Butler, the dual tradition of Afro-American fiction is dominated by the dialectical tension between oral and literary traditions, by the struggle for freedom from all forms of oppression and by the personal odyssey to realize the full potential of one’s complex biracial and bicultural identity as an Afro- American.

The authors of this period have celebrated the multiplicity and complexity of Afro- American identities. Crucial to this effort has been the recovery work being done by historians and social scientists as well as creative and critical writers. The experience of slavery has been of particular interest to today’s black writers and it has been used as a means of better understanding the present. Notable examples of literature that draw on the slave’s experience include The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) by Ernest Gaines, Corregidora (1975) by Gayl Jones, Oxherding Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1990) by Charles R. Johnson, Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison, Dessa Rose (1986) by Sherley Anne Williams and Mama Day (1988) by Gloria Naylor.

The veritable explosion of writing by Afro-American women is the most significant development in Afro-American literature since the 1970s. The relative success of three novels published in 1970—I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, The Third Life of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison—identified the existence of a market for black women writers. Writing about their own experience and the experiences of their ancestors, these and other black women writers changed the direction of Afro-American literature by introducing new themes. The authors’ primary focus on the black community rather than on the relationship between blacks and whites allows them to make inquiries into the parameters of motherhood, the dynamics of class difference among blacks and the ambiguous expectations of sexuality and love.

In some respects, these women used their fiction to respond to the social and political issues, past and present their common objective seems to have been an age-

53 old one—representation. A major change in their fiction from that of their precursors was that black women were frequently the main characters and they usually were not white phenotypes. These women often had integrity, strength, wisdom and inner beauty—as had Pilate in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Early critics of Morrison’s book expressed concern that a man—Milkman Dead—was at the centre; but later critics showed evidence of Pilate’s centrality. In fact, Milkman was indebted to more than one woman for his very life and it was evident the women in his family were the ones who taught him about his past so he could be free to fly.

Issues of skin colour and standards of beauty did not disappear, but rather were revised, often with a vengeance. Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye exemplified the trend with its focus on a dysfunctional family, the Breedloves, and the daughter Pecola who wants blue eyes; indeed, she desires the bluest eyes because she needs to escape not only what she feels is her own ugliness, but also the ugliness of the world—a world in which she can be raped by her father, abandoned in favour of a white child by her mother and despised by almost everyone in her community. Over the years, black women writers began to make their presence felt in literary genres once largely the province of men and white women. “New Directions” as a subtitle might be misleading because black women writers have always been going in new directions or else there would be no tradition to write about. But the need to be concerned about proscriptions that threaten to stifle creativity is all but a thing of the past. As their literary history shows, black women have long been writing their own lives instead of being written about, in other words, imagining themselves, as Toni Morrison has written. Fortunately, the privileging of the voices of black women continues and not to the detriment or exclusion of other voices. These are the women, black women writers have gone in search for and in the process have found their legacy in the preservation of wonderful stories.

What is significant about the work of the cadre of black authors working in English in North America and the Caribbean today is not only its range and sheer size, but also its difference from Afro-American literature of the previous half century. For the most part literary realism and naturalism have faded in appeal to black writers and all the literary allusiveness and heightened irony and tension of modernism—plus the free mixing of genres and sensibilities of magical realism and postmodern aesthetics—carry the day.

Gone, too, is the preoccupation with the law and the legal status of the black subject, along with the issue of class. Identity now is as likely to be shaped by gender or sexual preference, by personal history perhaps informed by a racialized past or by one or more addictions of the body or the mind. All of these stories, poems and dramas are played out against the backdrop of white racism and the history of a once subjugated race, but in all of them the Afro-American subject controls the interrogation of that past.

Toni Morrison argued, in her groundbreaking consideration of American literary history Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993), that American literature is suffused with the Afro-American presence. By the end of the century she could have noted that Afro-American literature was, in fact, triumphant. It would no longer be possible to refer to “an” American literature without meaning the literature of race and the terms for that discussion had been set by black writers over the course of two centuries.

The mode of investigation in the current thesis involves the use of a theoretical posit of different prominent feminist perspectives vis-a-vis each chapter.

Works Cited

Andrews, William, ed. Six Women’s Slave Narratives. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Print.

Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room. 1956. New York: Dial P, 1984. Print.

---. Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Knopf, 1953. Web. 24 Sep. 2010. .

Bambara, Toni Cade, ed. The Black Woman: An Anthology. New York: New American Library, 1970. Print.

Beaulieu, Elizabeth Ann. The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003. Print.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. Maud Martha. New York, NY: Harper, 1953. Web. 24 Sep. 2010. .

Carabi, Angels. “Interview with Gloria Naylor.” Belles Letters 7.3 (Spring 1992): 36- 42. Print.

Chodorow, Nancy. Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989. Web. 19 Jan. 2009. .

---. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. 1978. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. Web. 19 Jan. 2009. .

Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergammon P, 1985. Print.

Diamond, Arlyn, and Lee Edwards. The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1977. Web. 11 June 2009. .

Donovan, Josephine C., ed. Feminist Literary Criticism: Exploration in Theory. UP of Kentucky, 1989. Print.

Douglass, Frederick. “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.” Autobiographies. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Library of America, 1994. Print.

Equiano, Olaudah. “The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa.” Norton Anthology of American Literature, 5th ed. Eds. Nina Baym et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. Print.

Fields, Amanda. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006- 08. Web. 24 Sep. 2010. .

Fryser, Judith. The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1976. Print.

Gaines, Ernest. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. 1971. New York: Bantam Books, 1972. Web. 19 Jan. 2009. .

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Print.

Gayle, Addison, Jr., ed. The Black Aesthetic. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972. Print. Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. 1959. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Print.

Harper, Francis. Iola Leroy; or Shadows Uplifted. 1892. Introduction. Hazel Carby. Boston: Beacon, 1987. Web. 19 Jan. 2009. .

Hopkins, Pauline E. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. 1900. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Web. 19 Jan. 2009. .

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990. Print.

Irigaray, Luce. The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991. Print.

Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 1861. Ed. Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. Print.

Jaffrey, Zia. “The Salon Interview with Toni Morrison.” 2 February 1998. Web. 11 June 2009. .

Johnson, Charles R. Middle Passage. New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1990. Print.

---. Oxherding Tale. 1982. Web. 11 June 2009. .

Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. 1975. Boston: Beacon, 1986. Print.

Kaplan, Sydney Janet. Feminine Consciousness in the Modern British Novel. Urbana/Chicago/ London: U of Illinois P, 1975. Print. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. New York: Doubleday, 1976; rpt. Oxford UP, 1985. Web. 11 June 2009. .

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1987. New York: Knopf; New York: Vintage, 2004. Print.

---. The Bluest Eye. 1970. New York: Penguin; New York: Plume, 1994. Print

---. Song of Solomon. 1977. New York: Penguin; New York: Vintage, 2004. Print.

Neal, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement.” 1968. National Humanities Centre Resource Toolbox The making of African American Identity Vol.III, 2007. Web. 11 June 2009. .

---. Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings. New York: Thunder’s Mouth P, 1989. Print.

Olney, James. “I Was Born: Slave Narratives; Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature.” The Slave’s Narrative. Eds. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Print.

Pratt, Annis V. “The New Feminist Criticisms: Exploring the History of the New Space.” 1970. College English 32.8 (May 1971): 872-8. Web. 11 June 2009. .

Shockley, Ann. Loving Her. 1970. New York: Avon, 1978. Web. 11 June 2009. .

Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1977. Web. 19 Jan. 2009. .

Smith, Barbara. Toward a Black Feminist Criticism. New York: Out & Out Books, 1982. Print.

Stein, Gertrude. Everybody’s Autobiography. 1937. Berkeley, CA: Exact Change, 2004. Print.

Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Print.

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. Print.

---. Meridian. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Print.

---. The Temple of My Familiar. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989. Print.

---. The Third Life of Grange Copeland. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970. Print. Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1901. Web. 19 Jan. 2009. .

Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1920. Web. 19 Jan. 2009. .

---. Custom of the Country. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1913. Web. 19 Jan. 2009..

---. The House of Mirth. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1905. Web. 19 Jan. 2009.

Williams, Sherley Anne. Dessa Rose. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1986. Web. 19 Jan. 2009. .

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Oxford: Oxford UP. 1998. Print.

CHAPTER - 3

Female Authorship and Women’s Issues

Chapter III

Female Authorship and the Women's Issues

1. Female Authorship

Women's issues became a vital matter in advanced, democratic societies and are discussed in areas ranging from the human rights, literature, politics, culture and sociology. The position of women and gender equality must be dealt with in all societies that strive for harmony and their citizens' general well-being. This issue came into focus once women became aware of the limitations of their existence and the oppression they were subjected to for centuries. Nevertheless, this awakening did not occur simultaneously all over the world; by contrast, the West and East nurtured significantly different attitudes towards women and thus, they approached this social revolution in different ways at different times.

During the times of confinement and loneliness, many women found comfort in writing. Due to the limited range of occupations women were allowed to opt for, many women had to earn for their living by doing non-creative, repetitive jobs, mostly domestic in nature. Since they were not considered suitable for pursuing higher education, they could not choose careers such as, a doctor, lawyer or banker. Furthermore, not only did women have a limited choice of occupations available to them, they were also not allowed to fulfill their spare time with activities that men considered inappropriate for them.

Hence, the societies of previous centuries made clear distinctions between the lifestyle adequate for men and the lifestyle allowed for women. Even in the domain of leisure and hobbies there were double standards regarding the activities men and women could indulge in. While men were allowed to and were even at times praised for binge-drinking, gambling and womanising, women, on the other hand, were expected to spend their free time knitting, reading or socialising with one another. The stringent control of personal activities was implemented at all levels, starting from family. Namely, young girls were trained and monitored by their mothers and aunts on how to maintain an air of respectability and decency, all with the aim of marrying well. Among the activities that were not encouraged was writing. Even

60 though girls and women were allowed to read, their reading material had to be previously approved of. If a text abounded in lascivious language or advocated philosophy that was deemed socially harmful, then it would have been put on the list of prohibited literature. It is clear that a society that thrived on its citizens' obedience would not allow them access to revolutionary or liberal ideas and encouragement. Hence, although reading of some contents was possible, writing for women was discouraged on the grounds that they simply had nothing relevant to say.

Indeed, during that period, it was beyond imagination that a woman could know something essential about the world or that men should read what a woman would write. A fact that contributes to the argument about the attempts to erase women from all relevant social practices, including their participation in art, is that in Shakespeare's times women were not allowed to act and all roles in a play, including the roles of women, were actually played by men. In addition, the same as reading unapproved books, writing was also deemed potentially corrupting. Nonetheless, despite the fact that they knew their books could not be published and, in most cases, did not harbour such aspirations, many women had the need to express themselves in the written form. Besides being an interesting way to utilise their time, many of them found comfort, relief and privacy in this creative activity.

They usually wrote diaries, which recorded their daily activities, thoughts and feelings, but gradually some of them filled their pages with verses or even philosophic contemplations. Others, however, treated their writings as little escapades from the reality of life and used their imagination to create worlds they could be happy in. Illusioned by romantic ideas of life, marriage and love and later faced with harsh disappointments, they realised they could still find a gateway to that better world and that it could be reached by means of writing and imagination. On their pieces of paper they were still able to meet the prince charming they heard about in fairytales told to them by their mothers.

However, there have always been women who refused to be subordinated and restrained and owing to their visionary approach and courage, today they can freely choose to do what they like, vote in election, choose a profession and participate in all kinds of public debates. The label of true revolutionaries was definitely deserved by the pioneers of female authorship, including Brontë sisters, for instance. In spite

61 of the fact that writings by women were not considered for publishing, these women succeeded in conveying their message and leaving a long-lasting trace. Faced with social unfairness, they had to find a way to hide their femaleness which they eventually managed to.

They overcame the obstacle in the shape of their gender by publishing books under male pseudonyms. Brontë sisters used the names of Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily), and Acton (Anne) Bell, preserving their initials. Hence, these women managed to outwit society and fulfill their desires to be authors. Their books achieved exorbitant success and excellent criticism, while the general public was in shock later to discover their true identities. The novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë is today considered to be one of the first sustained feminist novels. (Davies, 1996) Charlotte Brontë claims that men cannot seem to see women in the true light and are guided by the need to classify them either as good or bad, without any middle ground or other character dimensions. She writes about how man cannot read women, which we may understand both literally, with regard to female characters, and metaphorically, when it comes to relationships between men and women in real life:

If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are, often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in true light: they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. (Brontë, Shirley in Moglen: 164)

Morris (1994) elaborates on why the male version of truth and thus the male version of femininity have become universal. She blames it on the male cultural dominance which "perpetuates and authorises male versions of femininity, male illusions about women, as 'human' truth, as the 'reality'. Thus women, too, come to read women as men read them, accepting men's visions of the feminine as their own: 'Women', writes de Beauvoir, 'still dream through the dreams of men'." (Morris:15)

Virginia Woolf, considered to be one of the establishers of the feminist thought, although the movement itself was not in sight in her day, often wrote about the conditions of life that limit women, especially women who wanted to write. In her ground-breaking essay, informally one of the manifestos of feminism, A Room of

62 One's Own, Woolf looks back on the numerous lacks that constitute a female life and eventually impede creativity. Although her complaints focus on the material aspects of existence, she, in fact, illustrates the political and social climate that have given rise to the female absence in many areas, including art. However, she also reflects on the constraints upon women's physical movement, keeping them in the confines of their homes. In Woolf's view, the passivity of the mundane life produces the need for expression and creation. She notices the female creative force that was welling up for centuries, waiting to be released: "Women have sat indoors all these millions of years so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force." (Woolf in Morris, 63) Jane Austen also dedicates attention to gender inequality, shedding light on the male privileges of education and access to reading and writing: "Men have had every advantage over us in telling their own story; Education has been theirs in so much higher degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything." (153)

From the earliest days of female authorship, the criticism they received was undoubtedly of different tone and based on different grounds from the one directed at their male counterparts. At first their attempts at producing serious pieces of literature were dismissed as inferior and only later did the critics assume a more objective approach. When it comes to the way female authors were accepted in more recent times, many feminists and female artists claim that they still receive a different treatment. A good example is his Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (1973), in which he claims to be offering a new history of literature. (Morris: 48) Bloom gives no place to any female poet as he argues that the world of poetry is a world of battles and warriors, a world where there are no women, but only fathers and sons - it is a "battle between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites." (11) What is more, Bloom leaves no place for doubt as he unambiguously confirms: "Poems are written by men." ( 43)

However, he makes one exception when he mentions the role of a poet's muse, which he sees as female. Nonetheless, he remains malevolent toward the female gender, characterizing the muse as a whore who has had others before him. This is yet another example of the male tendency to prioritise sexuality when shaping female characters. A common complaint heard from women writers is that their books are judged on the basis of their personality or private lives.

63 Hence, it appears that the reception of books by female authors is even nowadays under the influence of the first genre of the female writing - diary. Thus, the fact that women first experienced writing through recording accounts of their lives seems to have left a long-lasting impression that women can write only about their personal experiences and that they lack imagination or power of objective or philosophical reasoning. Moreover, many scholars have laid claims about the peculiarities of both male and female style of writing, insisting that each gender has its unique manner of expression. There was obviously a tendency to equate general characteristics of each gender with their style of writing that undoubtedly simplified and generalised members of both.

Thus, it is apparent that discrimination was significantly present not just in the circles of literary criticism and publishing, but also among the scholars who gave and supported views of this kind. This issue will be further elaborated on from the perspective of authors themselves and their personal experiences entering the world of literature far back in the late sixties and early seventies. It is relevant to include statistical data that point to the alarming disproportion in the male-female presence in numerous anthologies, collected by various scholars and published by renowned publishers.

Tillie Olsen found in her research that focused on the anthologies included in the curricula for undergraduate studies that the percentage of female authors is only 9 whereas the percentage of texts by male authors is 91. (186-9) Joanna Russ, a feminist and one of the female pioneers in science fiction, expresses surprise at these numbers, but is also confused when it comes to the list of female names that are included in some anthologies and left out in others:

What is so striking about these examples is that although the percentage of women included remains somewhere between five and eight per cent the personnel changes rather strikingly...Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Brontë bob up and down like corks, Edith Wharton is part of English literature in 1968 and banished into outer darkness in 1977 and yet there are always enough women for that five percent and never quite enough to get much past eight per cent. (Russ: 79)

However, although women demand application of equal standards in criticism of male and female authors, some of them admit that the significant differences in

64 life styles of the two genders make the comparison of their writings extremely difficult. Pam Morris (1994) primarily asks how women can be judged on the equal grounds as men when they have been left outside the public sphere until recently. So as to establish a more objective and equal approach toward works of women writers, the literary cannon would need to be readjusted. It would have to include forms and content accessible to women in their undeniably different and limited routines. The question of the objectivity of critics cannot be discussed only in the context of literature but requires taking into account history, politics, tradition and all factors that contributed to the discrepancies in status between men and women. This once again underlines the links between fiction and reality, literature and history. How can women receive the equal treatment from literary critics if they do not receive it from their employers and finally, although equality between the sexes is the ultimate goal, it does not mean that men and women are the same or that they should ever be.

How, then, can we compare unlike with unlike and do justice to the achievements of both sexes? Moreover, for much of history and in many cultures women have been denied a public voice, closed off within the private sphere. Should we not, therefore, include personal writing like letters and diaries as legitimate genres within the canonical tradition, and how, if we do so, shall we evaluate them alongside work like Milton's "Paradise Lost"? (Morrison: 53)

Despite all the distinctions that may come across as unjustified, the female authorship certainly nurtures a special, different approach towards the analysis and establishment of the women's issues. By obtaining the opportunity to speak for themselves, instead of being spoken about, women embark on a mission to fulfill the silences in literature and the blanks in history. They shape female characters that express levels of existence and shades of meaning characteristic of women's mental and emotional structures. Besides creating authentic female figures, women authors foster a special kind of relationship toward their heroines. Apart from the autobiographical elements that may appear as a motivation, they develop various attitudes toward them, at times offering compassion and encouragement, at times forcing them to accept responsibility and face life as it is.

They see their protagonists as themselves, their daughters, friends or mothers, trying to warn them about the dangers lurking around them but finally letting them

65 find their own path. Even though they are thought to be writing only romance novels, women have actually proved themselves as serious analysts of social, political and cultural matters of their time. Alongside writing for their own satisfaction or to fulfill spare time of their female readers, women also write because their versions of events and experiences give a new shape to history, art and human thought. Even when they write about the contemporary issues, female authors of the postmodernist era refer to the past, on a quest for answers and thereby provide a reconceptualisation of history in the framework of female concerns. Therefore, the importance of writing by women is multifold and it does not only cover the area of culture and art, but it examines, challenges and redefines the political and social foundations of contemporary life. Although women worldwide significantly differ in their lifestyles, beliefs and values, what all female authors insist on, irrespective of their background, is the significance of speaking about themselves and for themselves, on their own terms.

Nevertheless, when the differences between male and female authorship and the treatment they receive is put aside, we are left with yet another issue - the status of subaltern groups within women themselves, such as coloured or lesbian female authors. Their especially precarious positions give their work different dimensions and contexts and there is also the question whether they should be approached with different criteria, as well. The superiority of the white women from the developed world gives rise to suspicion and hesitation in women of other backgrounds with regard to supporting the feminist movement or cause. The problems within the feminist movement itself will later be discussed in further detail.

1.1 The Women’s Issues in Feminism

It is thought that the feminist movement was sparked by the civil rights campaigns and outbursts of general dissatisfaction in France and in the USA in the 1960s, when female activists noticed that the female agenda remained on the margins despite the rhetoric of freedom and equality employed by their male "comrades". Even though in theory the gender equality seemed to be an appealing and acceptable idea, the stereotypical perceptions of women still lingered in all domains of life. (Morrison:13)

It could be said that the feminist movement was created when women came to the realisation that their cause had to be fought for separately since the battle for

66 freedom and equality seemed to have failed them. The feminist movement as a political cause is closely linked to feminist literature and literary criticism that serve as its documents and manifestos. One of the first areas where gender inequality is directly addressed is undoubtedly literature, with the already mentioned female authors who lamented their lives that denied them the opportunity to create art as freely as men did. These accounts could not but make reference to history and politics that constructed the power relations and those gradually gave birth to the political agenda of feminism.

Any serious discussion on feminism inevitably leads to the question what feminism exactly stands for. It must be said that this movement has gained a great deal of attention in the general public, which led to its popularisation but also rendered diverse versions of its agenda. Today's insistence on human rights that are advocated and protected by many organisations, especially in the West, has turned freedom and equality into a catchphrase, often used without any understanding of what it actually involves. However, it seems that feminism became an especially interesting subject in popular culture, which gave to it new shades of meaning. Nevertheless, despite the significant numbers of supporters, feminism still faces a fierce opposition that sees it as a hostile organisation which aims at distorting the social system by erasing or disfiguring the notions of marriage, family, heterosexuality, childbearing, etc. This argument is supported by the descriptions of feminists as enraged, hysterical women who hate men, which is what the majority of those who oppose it believe. Furthermore, women who fight for this cause are most frequently described as being 'bitch' or 'tomboys' and are expected to be lesbians.

The novels that are the subject of this thesis also provide good examples of these stereotypical accounts of feminists. Furthermore, the feminist struggle is generally seen as a sort of war between the sexes, although its goal is not to judge or persecute men but to ensure better conditions for women. However, the fight for a future of gender equality involves a reconsideration of the past and therefore of various literary and historical documents that reveal the underlying power hegemonies and dynamics of male-female relationships that were not, in most cases, equal or fair.

This thesis deals with an author who never declared herself as feminist but was labeled as such by others, either critics or public, or both. Her novels focus on

67 female characters who also contemplate their femininity and tackle issues such as, marriage, childbirth, abortion, sexuality, etc, that are usually dealt with within the framework of feminism.

Most feminist or women's studies curricula begin with The Feminine Mystique by Betty Freidan, the piece that is commonly credited with triggering the second wave of feminism in the USA. Friedan carried out a thorough research on lives of American housewives and found out that despite the material comfort, marriage and children, a big number of them felt unhappy. Friedan is still celebrated as one of the crucial figures of feminism because she had the courage to say that perhaps marriage and children are not enough.

Furthermore, Friedan criticizes the contents of women's magazines, mostly run by men, which insist on portraying the satisfaction that arises from housework and glamourising the women's daily routine, hence making it more appealing. She rejects theories, such as Freud's, that women's destiny is defined by biology and that career women are neurotic due to "penis envy". In addition, she claims that the structure of education for women is different from the one for men, being based mostly on functionalism. She attributes this to the fear that too much education would ruin women's femininity or their sexual function.

A work that is one of the first attempts at providing a history of women's writing is Literary Women by Ellen Moers. It gives a review of texts of English and French literature dating back to the late 18th century. While many critics (e.g. Moi 2002) consider it to be merely a stepping stone that opened doors for more serious feminist literary histories, Morrison (1994) singles it out for establishing links between the female authors who were contemporaries, underlining the need for the female friendship and support, as well as determining the special nature of the female voice: "Each of these gifted writers had her distinctive style; none imitated the others. But their sense of encountering in another woman's voice what they believed was the sound of their own is, I think, something special to literary women." (Moers : 66)

Cheryl L. Brown and Karen Olson in their anthology Feminist Criticism: Essays on Theory, Poetry and Prose deal primarily with criticism written by women about women authors and their work. Their conclusion is that the problem does not

68 lie just in the difficulties of female authors to have their work published but that the same problems apply to works of female critics as well. "What women critics were writing about women's literature was not being published in respectable numbers and was not readily accessible to concerned students and teachers." (xiii) Therefore, their anthology has only female contributors and introduces the trend of the women- centered approach. (Moi : 50)

A book which is a tribute and opened doors to female authors who were not known to the wider audience is Elaine Showalter's A Literature of their Own. Showalter focused only on British novelists and included a wide range of authors from Brontë sisters to Doris Lessing. Besides giving recognition to authors out of the spotlight, this anthology deals with the peculiarities of women's writing as a subculture and elaborates on the reasons why it is not possible to speak of women authors as of a unified group. She casts light on historical and social factors that impeded women's development of collective identity that would have allowed them to make more significant changes.

Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic focuses on the extremes of presenting women either as angelic or monster- like. They reflect on the stereotypical image of female writers as mad women who write hysterically from the confines of their rooms. They see the monster women as a woman who rejects to be selfless and wants to tell her own story. It is one of the first instances of literary theory and criticism that deals with the fragmentation of identity and uses characters as "avatars" of the author's own self.

It is important to state that feminism is not a homogenous movement, it, by contrast, consists of many subgroups whose attitudes differ on subjects, such as marriage. There are, for instance, cultural feminists, who believe that women must establish an alternative women's culture to counter the dominant one, founded by men. They study women's participation in all kinds of art and believe in the spiritual strength of women. (Pandey, 2010) The radical feminists, on the other hand, seek to deconstruct the class/caste system, which is according to them, dependent on sex. (Pandey, 2010)

On the subject of marriage, opinions vary from the more radical ones that consider it to be an "organised rape" to those who opine that the concept of marriage

69 is in need of adjustment or simply demand more freedom for women, within or outside marriage. Nevertheless, what they all have in common is the consensus on the need of gender roles revision and the importance of female friendship and sisterhood.

The concept and implementation of feminism largely differ in different regions of the world. While in the West it is relatively coherent, its form in the Orient had to undergo some conceptual alterations.

It should also be noted that black female authors, as well as black women in general, expressed hesitation to join or support feminism, perceiving it as a project intended for white women. They did not feel that their cause was covered by the agenda of feminism as they personally did not see their problems with oppression and discrimination resolved.

According to many scholars, the key issue is the division between the white and black women which is rooted in the master: slave or the master: servant opposition, which existed for so long and repercussions of which are still felt. This absence of unity between black and white women is what most feminists see as the burning issue or a bone of contention within feminism itself and it is what prevents it from acquiring wider significance. Frequent complaints that black female authors and critics voice are related to the academic superiority of white women, who do not appear solely as victims of sexism but as agents of racism, as well. What all of the black female activists agree on is that until white privileged women accept their share of responsibility for racial discrimination committed against black women, the feminist movement will not experience further consolidation or expansion. (see Hooks, 1989)

1.2 The Women’s Issues in Postmodernism

This section will try to give some answers to the question of the relation between postmodernism and feminism, or more precisely, deal with the ways in which postmodernism treats women, both as authors and as characters. Being contradictory in its essence, postmodernist theory does not give clear answers. One of the reasons for this is that many theorists within the movement still hold different stands regarding the position of women in the postmodernist agenda. It is a

70 widespread belief that the literature on women is more concerned with the content than form or style. Many critics believe that postmodernism's concern with stylistic experimentation does not enable women authors to express their ideas. (see Felski, 1989 and Hite, 1989) Ann-Jannine Morey adds that what was labelled by the androcentric establishment as "innovative" or "radical" may be generally irrelevant to women's writing. (248)

As a consequence of the incompatibility of postmodernism's emphasis on form and feminist concerns and "for having found themselves silenced in most postmodern discourses by phallogocentric structures, some feminist theorists have chosen to bypass postmodern discussion for more fruitful engagement elsewhere." (Morey: 259) Nevertheless, if we take a look at the postmodernism's primary goal - challenging the old canons - we perceive a link with the feminist agenda. Namely, both frameworks are intent on bringing about change and expanding the boundaries of knowledge. Furthermore, they share the need to question and confront history and acknowledge the existence of other versions. Morey says:

(...) the content of women's writing (which may or may not employ experimentation) offers a radical challenge to conventional canonical universes. Contemporary women's writing makes knowing use of metaphoric duplicity of language in order to dissolve (without entirely destroying) the authoritative boundaries of traditional, Western knowledge about meaning and the ultimate nature of things. (2000: 248)

It is relevant to include here the idea of two different types of postmodernism: an oxymoronic "traditional postmodernism" and an ambiguously situated "feminist postmodernism". The traditional kind "retains its lock upon traditional Western gender constructions" although it is keen on "experimentation with form-meaning structures". (Morey: 258) The need for a female version of postmodernism is supported by a study on women readers and postmodernism carried out by Elizabeth Long. The study focused on white middle-class women's reading groups.

The findings indicated that "educated and articulate female respondents (were) reading for realism, self-knowledge and morally significant characters (...) while dismissing the products of postmodernism with its decentered and fragmented selves as 'incoherent' and 'uninteresting.' " (Morey: 259) Morey proposes an answer for

71 these surprising results by claiming that "the female reader and writer occupy a different location relative to representation and postmodernist issues than the male reader and writer, hence the necessity of distinguishing feminist postmodernism from its traditional masculinist variation." (259) Hutcheon, nevertheless, considers the gap between postmodernism and feminism to be significantly smaller.

As a matter of fact, she sees feminism as a "shaping force of postmodernism" (In Morey: 260) In Poetics of Postmodernism Hutcheon states that postmodernism and feminism "share a concern for power - its manifestations, its appropriation, its positioning, its consequences, its languages", and they are trying to "challenge our traditional essentialised anchors in God, father, state and Man through the acknowledgement of the particular and different." (Hutcheon in Morey: 260)

2. Toni Morrison's Authorship

Toni Morrison produced some ground-breaking literary work during her prolific career, in terms of both, content and style, writing compelling stories about the lives of those on the margins of society - blacks and women. She is a winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize (1988) and the Nobel Prize for literature (1993). Her work was welcomed by critics and readers, being a compact mélange of art and politics. Besides novels, she is most acclaimed for, Morrison also produced critical works, such as Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature and Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination, wrote books for children and delivered numerous memorable speeches.

In Playing in the Dark and Unspeakable Things Unspoken she reflects on her experience of being a writer, but also looks into the treatment of black identity in American fiction. She embarks on a search for the ways of creating and erasing identities and is determined to reveal how literature condoned or opposed discrimination. Her focus is set on the group perhaps the most discriminated against __ black women. Their lives, in which they must deal with racial and sexual discrimination on a daily basis, provided an excellent foundation for Morrison's literary agenda. Apart from being a successful artist, Morrison is also a very perceptive observer and critic of social trends and politics. Her novels and literary criticism dwell on the issues of oppression, cultural appropriation and stereotyping. Singled out for its fierce commentaries on oppressive power hegemonies, her literary

72 and social ideology are often brought into connection with feminism and black nationalism.

Morrison tackles the problem of being a female author nowadays, a black woman author, to be precise. Most of her novels feature female protagonists, which reveals her special interest in the construction of female psyche. She usually places her heroines in all-women communities in order to explore relationships between women, primarily the mother-daughter relationship and female friendship. Her female characters are bold, audacious and often border on madness. Their actions are contested by the wider community as they refuse to comply with strictly defined gender roles. Their rebellious nature is often seen as unearthly and demonic so they are excellent examples of social labelling of women as 'monsters' or 'witches'- the labels most often associated with free-thinking women.

When it comes to the structure of her texts, they can be read through lenses of various theoretical perspectives, including feminism and postmodernism which will be applied in this thesis. They are not just literary, but also political and critical texts that should be read at different levels. Careful reading of her work reveals common features and recurrent motifs, such as the ambivalence of motherhood, the complex nature of female friendships, mythical power and social powerlessness of women, traumatic effects of repressed memory, haunted past, residual effects of slavery, etc.

2.1 Morrison's View on African Heritage and the Place of Black Literature in the USA

Morrison takes pride in her African heritage and insists on including elements of African cultural tradition into her work. She openly speaks about cultural appropriation and misrepresentation the black culture is exposed to. She is adamant when claiming that those who are non-black cannot understand and speak of the experiences the black community has undergone. She argues that none other but blacks can give themselves a voice to shape their identities. She is clear when she claims that black literature cannot be studied as part of American literature, having in mind the discriminatory nature of the traditional literary canon.

Therefore, Morrison has herself produced literary criticism with the aim to shed light on the special historical, political and social circumstances in which black

73 literature was shaped and which should therefore be taken into account when analysing it. As a matter of fact, the core of her literary creations in fact consists of discarded fragments and silenced voices of history. Narrators of her stories are those who in reality had no right to speak, let alone address an audience. However, she acknowledges that the tables have turned and that blacks have managed to obtain a voice of their own, which finally allows them to speak for themselves and become the subject of their own narratives. In Unspeakable Things Unspoken she claims that blacks are not, in fact, "Other", but choices.

Now that Afro-American artistic presence has been "discovered" actually to exist, now that serious scholarship has moved from silencing the witness and easing their meaningful place in and contribution to American culture. It is no longer acceptable merely to imagine us and imagine for us. We have always been imagining ourselves. We are not Isak Dineren’s "aspects of nature", nor Conrad’s unspeaking. We are the subject of our own narrative, witnesses to and participants in our own experience, and in no way coincidentally in the experience of those with whom we have come in contact. We are not, in fact, "Other". We are choices (Morrison: 133)

Thus, she opens history to revision, supplementing it with the missing parts that were meant to be forgotten. Consequently, the body of her texts poses a threat to the established social formations and approved versions of history. In light of those circumstances, it is clear why she is such a strong proponent of black literary theory and criticism. In her essay Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature Morrison presents the traditional canon as a "protected preserve" of the works of "White men", which according to Andrea Dimino marks her entry into an academic debate in which "the combatants seek to defend the canon or to transform it." (Dimino: 38) With the recently accessible perspectives of the black intelligentsia which contest its supremacy over truth, it is clear that the supporters of the traditional canon must struggle to retain the status quo. Morrison expresses her views on what is a writer's role and says that writers must transform politics into "intelligible, accessible, yet artistic modes of discourse." (In Dimino: 40) Similar to Edward Said, whose work she admires, she aims to expose the links between "canon building" and "Empire building" (Dimino: 40)

Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature and range (of criticism, of the history of

74 knowledge, of the definition of language, the universality of aesthetic principles, the sociology of art, the humanistic imagination), is the clash of cultures. And all of the interests are vested. (Morrison : 132)

She is adamant that literature reflects the political ideologies and accuses the American literature of the 19th century to be a mirror of the same restrictions and codes imposed on the black that enabled the white population to devise a satisfying sense of nationhood.

The very manner by which American literature distinguishes itself as a coherent entity exists because of this unsettled and unsettling population. Just as the formulation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart, so too did the literature, whose founding characteristics extended into the twentieth century, reproduce the necessity for codes and restriction. (Morrison : 5,6)

With regard to her attitudes on the issue of race and literature, Morrison places significant emphasis not just on its importance for the writings of blacks, but also for shaping and distinguishing the white literary project. She opines that although the black identity was to the biggest extent missing in the American literature of the 19th century, that its absence or shadow shaped "the choices, the language, the structure, the meaning of so much American literature." (Morrison : 135, 136) She describes the search for the African presence in American literature as "a search, in other words, for the ghost in the machine." (Morrison : 136)

One of the reasons why black literary criticism did not see eye to eye with its Euro-American counterpart is the latter's insistence on the separation of the literary text from its author. (Peach : 1) According to Peach, black writers needed to reclaim the identity and narrative voice in "countering centuries of dispossession and misrepresentation." (2000: 1)

2.2 The Importance of Language and Writing for Morrison

Toni Morrison allocates a big role in writing to language. She sees writing as "an act of language" but also first of all, as "an effort of the will to discover." (Morrison: 146) In her critical works she not only expresses her love of the creative power of language but also deals with the ways the language defines gender or

75 difference. In Playing in the Dark she describes her struggles with language in creating black identity.

I cannot rely on these metaphorical shortcuts because I am a black writer struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive "othering" of people and language which are by no means marginal or already and completely known and knowable in my work. (Morrison: xi)

Morrison is open about her audience and says that she is writing for black women. As a primary reason, she cites her own experience of being a black woman, which she cannot distance herself from when writing. Although she does not hold any grudges toward white women, she is among the black female authors who believe that traditional feminism is actually white feminism that failed to address problems of black women. She also looks back on her personal experience of being a woman writer and comments, "I am valuable as a writer because I am a woman, because women, it seems to me, have some special knowledge about certain things." (McKey in Peach: 13) Indeed, Morrison places significant emphasis on the special kind of knowledge and power women have access to throughout her novels. Her characters absorb knowledge from myths and their connections with forces of nature and inner instincts.

Besides describing the particularity of being a woman writer, Morrison also writes about being a black woman writer, which involves other social dimensions. In Playing in the Dark she reveals how, being a coloured woman writer, she has to think about the amount of freedom assigned to her: "(…) how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderised, sexualised, wholly raciallised world." (In Peach: 10) Furthermore, she argues that black women writers address different issues and use approaches different from those of white women writers or both black and white male authors. She also assigns different intentions to their writings. "I write for black women. We are not addressing men, as some white female writers do. We are not attacking each other, as both black and white men do. Black women writers look at things in an unforgiving/loving way. They are writing to repossess, rename, reown." (McKey in Peach: 13) Although critics have made references to her work as feminist, she has never identified her ideology as such. She opines that imagination requires freedom from any strictly defined categories.

76 In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can’t take positions that are closed. Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book – leaving the endings open for interpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity. I detest and loathe those categories. (Morrison in Jaffrey: 140)

2.3 Morrison and Ideologies

Morrison is careful about the implications that belonging to a particular ideological movement could involve. In case of feminism, she voices concerns that defining her works as feminist could render them repellent to readership. Although she is a supporter of the fight against patriarchy, Morrison does not believe in taking refuge in any kind of extreme counter-attack. She insists on that her view of a better society is the one of equality, the freedom of choice and more opportunities for all. "It’s off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I’m involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don’t subscribe to patriarchy, and I don’t think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it’s a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things." (Morrison in Jaffrey, 2008) Speaking about her experiences as a woman and as a black person, she cannot determine which role had more impact on her work. She believes it is the unique combination of both categories that provided her with a very distinctive perspective.

I think I merged those two words, black and feminist, growing up, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and very aggressive and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes. They had enormously high expectations of their, daughters and cut no quarter with us; it never occurred to me that that was feminist activity. (Morrison in Jaffrey: 142)

Morrison admits she has a problem with categories and labels and finds this to be one of the reasons she is reluctant to think of herself as a feminist. In recalling her childhood, she elaborates on many practices of black women that only later received the label 'feminist', such as female friendship. Writing about the courage and sorority of black women that existed long before feminism was born, Morrison demonstrates that feminist practices were actually applied even before its official theoretical agenda. With hindsight, she realised that black women were actually what later came to be known as 'feminists'.

77 So I was surrounded by people who took both of those roles seriously. Later, it was called 'feminist' behavior. I had a lot of trouble with those definitions, early on. And I wrote some articles about that, and I wrote some articles about that, and I wrote 'Sula', really, based on this theoretically brand new idea, which was: Women should be friends, with one another. And in the community in which I grew up, there were women who would choose the company of a female friend over a man, anytime. They were really 'sisters', in that sense. (Morrison in Jaffrey: 142, 143)

2.4 Black Women vs. White Women and the Shortcomings of Feminism

The position of black women writers is indeed a precarious one - they are the most marginalised group and yet have the biggest task at hand - to fulfill all the holes in historical narratives with their silenced black, female voices. Although there are undoubtedly many parallels between experiences of oppression for women worldwide, there still remain prominent differences, as well as the uneven presence in literary and critical circles. Nevertheless, it appears that postcolonial theory and black literature have more ground in common when it comes to the issue of women, having in mind the similarities of their equally silenced pasts.

One of the most renowned black feminists of today Bell Hooks elaborates on the position of black women in traditional feminism and gives guidelines for further consolidation of their agendas. In Talking Back Hooks describes the ways in which black women are excluded from the feminist criticism, as both subjects and objects and dwells on the consequences of the white academic elitism. She perceives the tendency to produce and present literary theory and criticism as complicated and hard to grasp, which renders them inaccessible to a wide range of social groups that could otherwise benefit from them. Hooks considers this tendency subversive to feminist scholarship. (36)

Thus, she insists on that feminist theory should be shaped and conveyed in a more accessible way so as to come across as relevant and approachable. She urges for the consolidation within the feminist movement and stresses the need for its engagement within the black community. "When one girl in four is a victim of male incest, one woman in three is raped, and half of all married women are victims of male violence, addressing ways men and women interact with one another daily must be a concern of a feminist." (Hooks: 130)

78 Furthermore, Hooks admits that black women are reluctant to join or support the feminist movement because they do not feel that it is addressing them in any respect. In order for feminism to be made into a coherent movement with social and political influence, Hooks argues, there must be a common understanding on what feminism stands for. To that end, she proposes that feminism be defined broadly as a "movement to end sexism and sexist oppression." and holds that this formulation would allow the establishment of a common political goal. (23)

Finally, Hooks claims that with the aim of reaching a program of unified feminism that would encompass the participation of black women, it is vital to acknowledge the role white women have as oppressors. Namely, although they are also discriminated against by men on the basis of their gender, white women are not only victims but also oppressors. Hooks attributes this phenomenon to the old servant-served opposition that still lingers in relationships between white and black women on a daily basis.

At times the insistence that feminism is really a 'white female thing that has nothing to do with black women' masks the black female rage towards white women, a rage rooted in the historical servant-served relationship where white women have used power to dominate, exploit and oppress. (Hooks: 179)

She attributes this power inequality between females to the pervasive influence of media, which link the concepts of beauty, self-confidence and success with the images of white women exclusively. "Black women's consciousness is shaped by internalised racism and by reactionary white women's concerns as they are expressed in popular culture, such as daytime soap operas or in the world of white fashion and cosmetics products, which masses of black women consume without rejecting this racist propaganda and devaluing of black women." (Hooks: 179)

Hooks's feminist perspective can be applied to Morrison's female characters since they express similar concerns regarding the position of black women in society. Namely, both, Morrison and Hooks, place the biggest emphasis on family as the basis for development and explore the long-term consequences of family abuse. "If we cannot convince the mothers and/or fathers who care not to humiliate and degrade us, how can we imagine convincing or resisting an employer, a lover, a stranger who systematically humiliates and degrades?" (Hooks: 22)

79 Hooks and Morrison agree that the root of family abuse in black communities lies in the dehumanisation of the black man who feels powerless and humiliated when he cannot perform his manly duties.

"The seemingly positive aspects of the patriarchy (caretaker and provider) have been the most difficult for masses of black men to realise, and the negative aspects (maintaining control through psychological or physical violence) are practiced daily." (Hooks: 178)

Finally, Hooks underlines the need for feminist action that would benefit not just women worldwide but would be a platform for social freedom and equality in general. She reminds that gender oppression is the most common kind of oppression today. "Feminist struggle to end patriarchal domination should be of primary importance to women and men globally not because it is the foundation of all other oppressive structures but because it is the form of domination we are most likely to encounter in an ongoing way in everyday life." (Hooks: 21)

2.5 Morrison's Female Characters and Concerns

Morrison's heroines are typically young women who fight with remnants of their oppressive past, both in real life and in their souls and are also discarded by the black community and other black women for their contempt of the black imitation of the white man's patterns of life. They do not conform to the expectations of their communities and do not wish to fulfill the stereotypical gender roles. They are bold enough to give their personal definitions of freedom and happiness that do not necessarily include marriage, family and motherhood.

The women in Morrison's fiction establish all-women households where they live with their mothers, grand-mothers and sisters, thus revealing the dynamics of these relationships. Susan Willis noted and named this pattern in Morrison's novels 'three-women utopian households' (In Duvall : 41) According to Duvall, these households serve as a "space for mediation on the sexual politics of the community." (10) He also maintains that the three-women household is a site of the mediation on the alternative spirituality of the maternal body that may be a counterforce to the patriarchal world of Christianity.

However, he states that such a revolutionary move requires the support and participation of a larger female community that needs to be spiritually integrated.

80 And understanding and support between women is exactly what is missing in all of her novels. (Duvall: 11) Despite their family ties, her characters all struggle to define themselves as individuals and might at times appear selfish and self-centered. By offering this kind of community as an alternative for the nuclear family, Morrison criticises the black appropriation of this social structure of the whites and suggests that it is not an ideal solution for the blacks.

"The dysfunction of the nuclear family is particularly freighted for Morrison, since she sees African-Americans who attempt to live within its frame as inauthentically trying to assimilate to the values of white culture." (Duvall: 11)

Although she does not express any contempt of men, Morrison gives them little space and focuses on the conflicts between women, instead. Indeed, her heroines do not seem to be held in check by men, but by other women's judgment and resentment. Hence, she writes about envy, possessiveness, pride and the insistence on Christian Puritanism, which torment women and leave virtually no space for the freedom of thought.

Perhaps even stronger than in the case of white women is the stereotype of a black homemaker. Known as extremely obedient and diligent, black women were praised as house help in homes of wealthy white people. As her novels suggest, having no other options for decent employment, black women enjoyed working in other people's households because it gave them an opportunity to get some recognition for their work, recognition they almost never received at home. Working as housekeepers, they acquired some insight into the world of white people, and could for a short while immerse themselves in the beauty of comfort and abundance they were deprived of. However, the stereotype of black women as good only for house-keeping and giving birth remained present for too long and is yet another marker of the underlying white supremacy Morrison has set out to expose.

Although in trying to obtain self-definition and claim ownership over their lives these protagonists often find themselves in confrontations, Morrison insists on the female unity and friendship, which is evident in the ending of the novels. In order to counter the importance placed on the institution of marriage in the Euro-American world, she demonstrates how these women have found their actual soul mates not in their husbands but in each other. However, brainwashed by the Western pattern of

81 happiness, they fail to acknowledge that and are deprived of each other's love. Desperately attempting to meet the demands society has put on them, they usually take on two patterns of behaviour. Either they try to play the role of a perfect wife and mother or they opt for a life of defiance and experimentation, both of which leave them unsatisfied and emotionally drained.

In her dealing with the subject of victimisation, Morrison seeks to expose all the ways and social norms that oppress women and suggests that the oppression of and aggression towards them take place on many levels and are psychologically much more difficult to overcome than those men face. By focusing on every phase of a slave woman's life, from infancy to childhood, from girlhood to motherhood, and on to old age, her novels make brutally clear that aside from the 'equality of oppression' that black men and women suffered, black women were also oppressed as women. Besides the regular toil and inhumane life conditions, slave women were also exposed to sexual harassment, abuse and humiliation. Gurlen Grewal notes, "they were routinely subjected to rape, enforced childbirth, and natal alienation from their children. As Morrison's novel shows, physical abuse is humiliating, but the added emotional plan of a mother is devastating." (1996: 6) It can thus be concluded that Morrison insists on portraying the burdens of being a woman, regardless of whether they were free or slaves.

The primary dimension that distinguishes women from men and especially marks the female body is motherhood. It is the only power given to women that is denied to men. It is the natural order that cannot be contested by the force of patriarchal law. It is the power that sometimes emerges in the form of a blessing and sometimes it comes as a curse or punishment. Motherhood is a woman's privilege that simultaneously imposes rules and expectations. Nonetheless, it is the power that gave rise to mythical depictions of women as goddesses, witches or even monsters.

The motif of motherhood is a recurrent one in mythology. Morrison depicts motherhood realistically, without any pretense of idealism or sugarcoating. She represents it as the deepest love and a life-long connection but also as a sacrifice not every woman is ready to make. De Weever observes that Morrison's novels feature a range of mythical mother figures, such as the nurturing mother who devours her children as an answer to the stereotype of the black mother. (Peach: 14) According to

82 Peach, 'the black mammy' is an especially damaging stereotype because it legitimises the association of black women with motherhood as their only function. ( 14) Thus, Morrison openly writes about women who do not wish to become mothers and decide to build their own personalities instead.

The biggest form of rebellion, however, is her heroine’s decision to murder her own children so as to save them from becoming slaves. Her determination not to define herself as a breeder of slaves was so strong that she rather chose death for her children. Her act of madness is a painful testimony of the psychological horrors of slavery that made her choose death over it.

Morrison’s heroines have to find ways of dealing with loss, personal and the inherited one. They have to deal with the demons from the past, brought about by the traumatic experiences of their enslaved ancestors. This phenomenon matches Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, in which he argues that every woman extends backwards into her mother and forward into her daughter, which means that every mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter contains her mother. Thus, Morrison's metaphors regarding maternity could be understood as archetypes of the mother, presumably the first and strongest of all archetypes.

According to Jung, archetypes are "living psychic forces that demand to be taken seriously". He adds, "an archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors." (In Grewal :15) However, the images of haunting and the spirit of her novels could also be explained with the Freudian principle of "the return of the repressed" or with a West African belief that holds that the dead live as long as they are remembered. Hence, remembering and storytelling are ways of keeping the hungry dead alive. (Grewal, 1996) In the essay Stabat Mater Kristeva gives her own powerful definition of motherhood, "A mother is a continuous separation, a division of the very flesh, consequently a division of language." (In Grewal 1986) It emphasises the painful side of motherhood, the experience of separation and loss.

Another issue Morrison is trying to deconstruct in her novels is female sexuality. As women, her heroines are forced to give their sexuality some purpose. Those who decide to abide by the social norms, have children while others might seek meaning and fulfillment in promiscuity. Some of them have liberal definitions of sexuality but the biggest sin of all that the black community does not ever pardon

83 is having sexual relations with white men. It is yet another proof that a woman's sexuality is considered to be public, since the ways one employs it seem to have the power to offend, enrage or embarrass the entire community.

By contrast, male bodies and sexuality are rarely a topic of any conversation or public consideration, except in a playful or boastful way. Male sexuality is seen as yet another task they should perform, the more the better, and by doing so, prove their normality. Male promiscuity fits the pattern of a powerful, masculine, determined man who is in control. In control of what or who? And what is the connection between a man's sexual urge and his desire to establish control? It was already mentioned that Morrison's female characters live in female communities and are linked with mythical descriptions of women, with the special emphasis on the characters of grand-mothers who are thought to have supernatural powers or knowledge of rituals and laws of nature or are seen as ordinary but very powerful characters.

They are worshiped by entire communities and their houses are places of gatherings, where people come asking for help when in need. These characters are portrayed as some kind of a female priestess, endowed with special powers of understanding and healing others. What is more, they are the ones who establish homes for their families and build life from nothing. It could be argued that in this respect they indeed deserve the label of 'miracle-workers'. In New Dimensions of Spirituality Demetrakopoulos and Holloway (1987) note that Morrison's novels feature "a celebration of African archetypes," among which is the Great Mother, as the embodiment of nature and wisdom.

In the light of Jung's theory developed in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, when the archetype of the mother is transferred to the grandmother, it becomes even more powerful and consequently, grandmothers are associated with the qualities of wisdom or, in some cases, even witchcraft. They embody the common duality between good and evil and are portrayed as malevolent as well. This brings to mind the binary opposition theory, which seems to be ingrained in the perception of all females. (virgin-whore; angel-devil; fairy-witch) Apart from focusing on the characters who are trying to find adequate self- definitions in a highly racialised and genderised world, Morrison also dwells on the phenomenon

84 of blacks' self-hatred. She argues that the ideals of white popular culture which impose the standards of beauty imply that white is beautiful, while black is ugly.

The media propaganda managed to inculcate this harmful mantra into generations of black girls and women. "Throughout the narrative, the materials of mass culture are used to define the white standard and to preclude any black self- definition." (Byerman: 133)

The perfect example of the detrimental effect of the racially coloured popular trends is the self-hatred, which later transformed into madness. Surrounded by products, such as dolls and sweets loaded with ideological messages of the white consumer society, the heroine of Morrison’s novel’s image does not fit the standards of beauty or popularity and consequently, does not manage to establish and maintain the feeling of self-worth. Seeing hatred in everybody else's eyes, she developed it herself. Her self-loathing culminated as severe madness when she started imagining she had one of the standards of beauty from the white society and talking to herself. Her only hope of acceptance was to somehow get that untouchable beauty as those of Shirley Temple, who everybody loved. "White dollars, Mary Jane candies, movies, advertising, and most important in this study of daughters, Shirley Temple all embody presence in the text, against which blackness is an absence." (Byerman: 133) Speaking of the presence of race in the dominant culture, Morrison observes:

The habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognise an already discredited difference. To enforce its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. According to this logic, every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse. (Morrison: 9, 10)

Morrison argues that self-hatred is passed up and down, creating a circle of hatred among the black community. The feelings of powerlessness and humiliation, brought about by white supremacy, created a powerful need for violence that they could inflict on nobody else but themselves. In that way, the circle of violence among the blacks is established. Men, who feel mentally castrated, exercise violence on their wives and daughters, realising they cannot give them anything else they are

85 expected to provide as men. Frantz Fannon argued for the need of retaliation and the use of violence against the oppressors as the only means of regaining not just freedom but the right to live like a human being. Among his reasons for the use of counter-violence he includes self-hatred and aggression within the black community. In Wretched of the Earth he is adamant when saying that if the aggression is not directed toward the source of it, that is, the oppressor, it will be misdirected, breeding more hatred and aggression among the blacks themselves.

"The native's weapon is proof of its humanity. For in the first days of the revolt you must kill - to shoot down a white man is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time." (24) For Fanon, violence is a vital means of psychic and social liberation. (Edwards: 69) "Violence is man recreating himself: the native cures himself through force of arms." (Fanon: 23) Edwards describes the circle of violence within the black community, "the cycle of violence begins as white-on-black violence and then moves into the black community and continues as black-on-black violence." (Edwards: 71).

They renounce their national and cultural identities with the aim of becoming accepted by the oppressor as one of their own. In such pursuits, they are often in charge of some ruthless tasks, such as, punishing and betraying their own so as to prove their devotion.

This kind of behaviour is also motivated by the strong feeling of self-hatred and hatred towards one's own origins. In climbing up the career ladder, these people spread contempt for their own culture and do their best to annihilate it. They would boast with their lighter skins and white ancestors, trying to prove they have managed to remove blackness of themselves. A good example is one protagonist of Morrison’s novel who although he himself was black, he was a racist who acquired the ways of the white people and liked to pretend to be one of them. " Moreover, Chinweizu's thesis that some African people have been so brainwashed by European propaganda that self-hatred characterises the African petty bourgeoise must have encouraged Morrison to pursue her interest in what drove some African-Americans to seek a white American identity." (Peach: 6)

2.6 Morrison and Postmodernism

Morrison's novels are labelled as postmodern primarily due to some of the characteristics of her style. Namely, she prefers circular narration to the linear one

86 and uses it as a technique for reviewing the past. This kind of perspective sheds a new light on history, which becomes reinscribed. Her narrators take us on a journey of revelation, through a haze of fragmented memory and retrospection. She avoids the first person narration in order to grant some privacy and mystery to her protagonists, who after all remain beyond the full grasp.

Her puzzling and sometimes completely irrational heroines point to the fact that truth is evasive even though they themselves are trying to find it. Their quest for the truth could be summed up as a quest for personal meaning, for some purpose in life. Her characters are marginal, decentered subjects whose insightfulness verges on the insanity. Peach argues that the core of black writing resides in the perception of the individual as "the subject of a political state, susceptible to the forces of control through language or discourse." (30)

Morrison’s use of the so- called slave narratives, besides having a powerful effect on readers, was intended to portray slaves from their own perspective and persuade readers they were "human beings worthy of God’s grace and to encourage them to press for the abolition of slavery." (Peach: 24) Thus, her narrative techniques were not only employed for the sake of the style but were also conducive to raising awareness about the importance of the battle for human rights. Perez-Tores observes the place of postmodernism in Morrison's writing and comments: "It filters the absent or marginalised oral discourse of a pre-capitalist black community through the self- conscious discourse of the contemporary novel." (In Peach: 20)

Denis Ekpo comments on the relevance of postmodernism for the entire African-American writing: "postmodernism in providing reconceptualisation, reconstruction or reiteration of African perceptions of the West might actually offer a route out of the Afrocentric ideal of contemporary African cultural and strategic thoughts." (In Peach: 20) Morrison wanted to demonstrate that contrary to some belief, black people were capable of expressing complex ideas and storytelling. She also tackles the issue of illiteracy by implying that depriving blacks of education was part of the enslavement project, which maintained prejudices about their natural intellectual inferiority.

Her exploration and redefinition of history is also typical of the postmodern, as she refuses to accept it as a canon and is determined to challenge its authenticity.

87 By giving voices to those who were silenced through history, she provides us with the missing pieces of the puzzle, which is the past. In her narration past is treated like yet another character because through her revision, she enables it to come alive in the present day. it exists in the present and seems to be alive. Furthermore, in analysing the relationship of the individual with the community, she depicts the consequences of history in both, private and public life.

When we analyse the relationship of Morrison's heroines with history and past, we perceive that their rather independent and isolated functioning on their own terms can be defined as existence on the "edge of culture". For Rigney, "the edge of culture" refers to "the wild zone just outside of and beyond history, the province of women, mythic figures who are not themselves actors in history but necessary mediators between biology and history, conservators of myth." ( 67) Jill Matus in her study on Morrison, Toni Morrison: Contemporary World Writers, states that Morrison's fiction represents a rich testimony to the past and to the special ways in which imaginative literature can speak of the past. (in Peach: 22)

Rigney argues that Morrison reinscribes femininity, identity and also history that are less individual than racial and national. She adds that the history as a construct in Morrison's novels is a psychic and mythic history and a feminine subtext, the one that Cixous and Clement describe in The Newly Born Woman as "a history, taken from what is lost within us of oral tradition, of legends and myths - a history arranged the way tale- telling women tell it." (Rigney: 61) Remembering proves as harmful to Morrison's heroines for it forces them to face the repressed traumatic experiences and what is more, prevent them from living in the present, which according to Grewal (1996), they cannot afford due to the demands of daily life. Caruth (1995) elaborates on this phenomenon of a repressed trauma by stating that a traumatic event is not experienced when it occurs, but is actually triggered only in connection with another place, and in another time. Morrison's concept of the past can be described by using Derrida's term as an "unfolding of presence" since it is a "past that has never been present and is more the product of construction than recollection." (Peach: 26)

Morrison was faced with a difficult task imposed on her by the choice of her narrators and characters. Namely, she had to devise a language for speaking about

88 the unspeakable. Thus, her novels consist of a great deal of showing and implying and at the same time they demand significant participation from the reader, who is meant to pay attention to subtle insinuations and read in between the lines. Writing or narrating about taboos and horrors such as incest, rape and murdering of your own children cannot be straight-forward. It requires careful examination of the past and sometimes even the help of the visitors from the past. Similar to other postmodern writers, Morrison had to create a discourse on pain and loss.

In words of Henry Luois Gates, Jr., Beloved invents and articulates a "language that gives voice to the unspeakable horror and terror of the black past." (In Plasa: 11) Sharing stories where one was the object of violence make one the object of pity as well. Besides sadness, it breeds a sense of shame and embarrassment for one does not just feel different from everyone else, one does become different than everyone else - labeled by pity and compassion. In the case of Pecola, when the story of her misfortune became public, she had no other choice but to resort to madness and interpret their avoidance and comments as jealousy rather than as contempt and pity.

The importance of discourse and language is especially analyzed in postmodern theory, which suggests that discourse is not just the mirror of reality but also an agent of reality. Hence, the language we employ impacts the construction of ideologies we live by. "Postructuralist theories of language draw attention to the need for us to question the relationship between language, meaning and what we normally regard as 'social reality' more than we usually do. Language does not merely reflect 'reality', it constructs it." (Peach: 29) According to Peach, one of Morrison's concerns is the nature of language which she perceives as ideologically coloured. He adds that language is not "a transparent window onto the world; it is more like a piece of stained glass that distorts and colours what we see through it." ( 29)

3. The Feminist Theory

Although feminism is usually referred to when women's issues is dealt with, the female novelist has an ambivalent relationship with this concept. Like for instance the famous writer Donna Nevel declares herself as a feminist and does not openly support this political movement, her work is often labelled as feminist by critics. This is due to their deep research of the peculiarities of female experience and

89 determination to expose the mechanisms that exploit women and erase their presence at all levels.

Nevertheless, her attitude is never biased and unjustified as she maintains a realistic and sometimes even critical relationship with her heroines, seeking to provide a convincing portrayal of the condition of being a woman. Although she does sympathise with her female protagonists, this writer does not defend them blindly, on the contrary, she insists on that some part of responsibility undeniably belongs to them. besides illustrating the social conditions and circumstances that limit their choices. Morrison agrees that there are moments when characters make mistakes themselves. However, another shared belief among them is the fact that they identify the family, community and education system as culprits for the lack of awareness that these heroines and their surroundings demonstrate.

4. The Postmodern Theory

As far as the postmodernist features of the work is concerned, these novelist adopt a postmodernist approach towards their characters, the narrative process and the conclusions they reach toward their end of the novel. They give their characters roles of travelers, wanderers and explorers who are meant to discover the deepest and the most frightening truths about themselves. On the journeys through their psyches, the dreadful arenas of the past and history, the protagonists must come to terms with who they are and accept part of the blame for their destinies.

It is important to mention that none of them reach a happy ending of the kind that is found in realism, for instance, as the major issues they are surrounded with remain part of their daily lives. Nevertheless, although epiphany is more a characteristic of modernism than postmodernism, these heroines do reach some kind of enlightenment, as they acknowledge the peacefulness that comes from acceptance. However, even though these novels do not achieve a cheerful ending, they hint that there could be some piece of light at the end after all. In the end, heroines manage to find comfort in themselves and with each other, that is, in female friendship or sisterhood.

Although they still do not accept the current state of affairs in the world, they do accept themselves as they are and the people they love. With regard to narration,

90 they most commonly choose the third-person narration that shifts through time, giving a complete image of the events and connecting causes with their consequences. The narrative processes they create consist of fragments, at times revealing and at times hiding away the truth from the readers and characters themselves. They manage to tell great stories with simple plots and virtually no action, only through portrayals of emotional and psychological struggles of often contradictory and deeply introvert heroines. In accordance with the fragmented narration they also depict fragmented identities, since the protagonists they choose often go through some kind of memory loss or repression and have to collect the pieces of themselves that are missing. Alongside the process of identity construction, they also undertake a task of history deconstruction. By offering their versions of history and by taking on the roles of those silenced in history and by history, they construct new historical perspectives and fulfill the voids made by censorship and intentionally leaving out female protagonists and their experiences.

91 Work Cited

Austen, J. (2008). Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. UK: Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax Bloom, H. (1973). The Anxiety of Influence. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Bakhtin, M. (1981). Discourse in the Novel. In M. Holquist (Ed.), The Dialogic Imagination (pp. 411, 412). Austin and London: University of Texas Press

Bowker, J. & Holm, J. (1994). Women in Religion. London: Continuum

Brown, C. & Olson, K. (1978). Feminist Criticism: Essays on Theory, Poetry and Prose. London: Scarecrow Press

Butler, J. (2007). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge

Byerman, K. (1997). Untold Stories: Black Daughters in “Absalom, Absalom” and “The Bluest Eye”. In C. Kolmerten, S. Ross & J. Wittenberg (Eds.), Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned (pp. 129-138). Jackson: University of Mississippi Press

Carter, A. (2012). New Critical Readings. S. Andermahr & L. Phillips (Eds.). London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group

Caruth, C. (Ed.). (1995). Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press

Chatterji, S. (1988). The Indian Women’s Search for an Identity. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House.

Cixous, H. & Clement, C. (1996). The Newly Born Woman. London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd Dey, E. (1986). Women in Fiction and Fiction by Women. C. D. Narasimhaiah & C. N. Srinath. (Eds.) Dhvunyaloka, India: Mysore

Cortazar, J. (1967). Hopscotch. London: Harvill Press

Davies, S. (1996). Introduction and Notes. In A. Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. London: Penguin Books

Demetrakopoulos, S. & Holloway, K. (1987). New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press

92 Dimino, A. (1997). Toni Morrison and William Faulkner: Remapping Culture. In C. Kolmerten, S. Ross & J. Wittenberg (Eds.), Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned (pp. 31-47). Jackson: University of Mississippi Press

Dubois, W.E.B. (1973). The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. New York: Kraus- Thomson

Duvall, J. N. (1997). Toni Morrison and the Anxiety of Faulknerian Influence. In C. Kolmerten, S. Ross & J. Wittenberg (Eds.), Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re- Envisioned (pp. 3-16). Jackson: University of Mississippi Press

Felski, R. (1989). Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Friedan, B. (2013). The Feminine Mystique. USA: W. W. Norton

Galehouse, M. (1999). New World Woman: Toni Morrison‟s “Sula”. Papers on Language and Literature, 35 (4), 339-362

Ghasemi, P. & Hijizadeh, R. (2012). Demystifying the Myth of Motherhood: Toni Morrison‟s Revision of African-American Mother Stereotypes. International Journal of Social Science and Humanity, 2 (6), 477-479

Gibson, G. (1973). Eleven Canadian Novelists. Toronto: Anansi

Gillespie, D. & Kubitschek, M. (2000). Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in “Sula”. In D. L. Middleton (Ed.), Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism (pp. 61-91). New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc.

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Moral Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Greer, G. (1995). Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet. London: Penguin

Grewal, G. (1996). Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Lousiana State University: Lousiana State University Press (Baton Rouge)

Griffiths, S. (Ed.). (1996). Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Forty Women Whose Ideas Shape the Modern World. Manchester: Manchester University Press

Gubar, S. & Gilbert, S. (1979). The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Heaven: Yale University Press

93 Gubrium, J. & Holstein, J. (1994). Grounding the Postmodern Self. The Sociological Quarterly, 35 (4), 695-703

Gulati, L. (1976). Age of Marriage of Women and Population Growth: The Kerala Experience. Economic and Political Weekly, 11 (31-33)

Harlan, L. (1992). Satimata Tradition: The Transformative Process. In L. Harlan, Religion and Rajput Women: The Ethic of Protection in Contemporary Narratives (pp. 112-153). Berkley: University of California Press

Hite, M. (1989). The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press

Hooks, B. (1989). Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press Irigaray, L. (1985). Speculum of the Other Women. Ithaca: Cornell University Press

Hutcheon, L. (2004). A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge

Jaffrey, Z. (2008). Toni Morrison. In C. Denard (Ed.), Toni Morrison: Conversations (pp. 139- 154). USA: University Press of Mississippi

Jain, J. (1997). The Plural Tradition: Indian English Fiction. In C. S. Singh (Ed.), Spectrum History of Indian Literature in English. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers

Jardine, A. (1981). Introduction to Julia Kristeva’s “Woman’s Time”. Signs, 7, 5-12

Jayaplan, N. (2001). History of India (from National Movement to Present Day). New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers

Jean, A. & Dubois, A. (1987). Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies. Oxford: Clarendon Press

Jia, L. (2002). Women‟s Voices: The Presentation of Women in the Contemporary Fiction of South-Asian Women (Doctoral Dissertation). Durham theses, Durham University. (2021)

Jung, C. G. (1990). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. USA: Princeton University Press

94 Kishwar, M. (1986.) Dowry – To Ensure Her Happiness to Disinherit Her?. Manushi: A Journal About Women and Society, 34, 2-13

Kristeva, J. (1986). Stabat Mater. In T. Moi (Ed.), The Kristeva Reader. London: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd.

Matus, J. (1998). Toni Morrison: Contemporary World Writers. Manchester: Manchester University Press

McCaffery, L. (1982). Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Bartheime and William H. Gass. Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press

McHale, B. (1987). Postmodernist Fiction. New York and London: Methuen

Middleton, D. (Ed.). (2000). Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc.

Moers, E. (1986). Literary Women. London: The Women’s Press

Moglen, H. (1984). Charlotte Brontë: The Self-convinced. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press

Moi, T. (2002). Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Routledge Morris, P. (1994). Literature and Feminism. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell

Morrison, T. (1970). The Bluest Eye. New York, NY: Washington Square Press

Morrison, T. (1988). Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature (presented as the Tanner Lecture on Human Values) The University of Michigan. Retrieved from http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to- z/m/morrison90.pdf

Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books

Murchland, B. (1971). The Age of Alienation. New York: Random House Punter, D. & Byron, G. (2004). The Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell

Narayanan, V. (1998). Women of Power in the Hindu Tradition. In A. Sharma & K. Young (Eds.), Feminism and World Religions (pp. 25-77). Albany: State University of New York Press

Nasta, S. (1991). Motherlands Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press

95 Olsen, T. (2003). Silences. New York: Feminist Press

Pandey, M. (2010). Feminism in Contemporary British and Indian English Fiction. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons

Peach, L. (2000). Toni Morrison. New York: St. Martin’s Press

Plasa, C. (Ed.). (1998). Toni Morrison “Beloved”. New York: Columbia University Press

Rigney, B. (1991). The Voices of Toni Morrison. Columbus: Ohio State University Press

Russ, J. (1983). How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press Showalter, E. (1977). A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Sarkar, T. (2001). Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism. New Delhi: Permanent Black

Smith, B. (1982). Toward a Black Feminist Criticism. New York: Out & Out Books

Suranyi, A. (2007). “The Bluest Eye” and “Sula”: Black Female Experience from Childhood to

Tally, J. (Ed.). (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Tate, C. (1985). Interview with Toni Morrison. In C. Tate (Ed.), Black Women Writers at Work. England: Old Castle Books

Thapan, M. (2009). Living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood and Identity in Contemporary India. New Delhi: SAGE Publications

Tirrel, L. (2000). Storytelling and Moral Agency. In D. L. Middleton (Ed.), Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism (pp. 3-25). New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc.

Titus, G. (2010). My Ishvara is Dead: Spiritual Care on the Fringes. Journal or Religion and Health, 49 (4)

Womanhood. In J. Tally (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison (pp. 11- 25). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

CHAPTER - 4

A Critical Analysis of the Novels ‘‘The Bluest Eye’, ‘Sula’ and ‘Song of Solomon’

Chapter IV

A Critical Analysis of Novels ‘The Bluest Eye’, ‘Sula’ and ‘Song of Solomon’

In the preceding chapter an analysis of Toni Morrison’s concern for racial issues and the Black identity has been made. In this chapter an investigation will be made on how Toni Morrison put her preaching into practice by analyzing her major novels viz., The Bluest Eye, Sula and Song of Solomon where the search for Black identity has been the dominant theme.

1. The Bluest Eye (1970)

The Bluest Eye (1970) is Toni Morrison’s first novel. After her separation from her husband, Harold Morrison in 1964, Morrison, already pregnant with a second child, underwent a depressive and unhappy phase of her life. Left on her own, she moved to Syracuse, New York in 1965 and took up an editing job at Random House. At the end of a busy day at the publishing house, she returned to her duties as a mother of two small boys. Every night, after feeding and sending the children to bed, Morrison had to look for ways to drive away her loneliness which inspired her to write the novel. The idea of the novel was inspired by a childhood incident about a friend who prayed hard to God to grant her blue eyes but in vain:

We had just started elementary school. She said she wanted blue eyes. I looked around to picture her with them and was violently repelled by what I imagined she would look like if she had her wish. The sorrow in her voice summed to call for sympathy, and I faked it for her, but, astonished by the desecration she proposed, I “got mad” at her instead. (Crayton 57)

While teaching at Howard University, she joined a writers’ group where she had to present some work for discussion, once she recalled the story of the wish for blue eyes and wrote it out, which earned her much appreciation. Years later, the story became the concept for the novel. Morrison continued working on the novel after her promotion as Senior Editor and moved to New York city. After its completion, several publishers however refused to publish it until finally a young editor at Holt, Pinehart and Winston publication accepted it. It was published in 1970.

Set in a Black, northern community in Ohio, Lorain in the 1940s, the story centers around the tragic story of a young Black and poor eleven year old girl called Pecola Breedlove who desires blue eyes. Rural migrants from the south, the Breedloves are a miserable and poor family who dwell in a store-front. However, their misery is not so much a result of their poverty as it is from their hatred for themselves and for each other. It is a grim family where the drunkard father Cholly and bitter mother Pauline fought and railed against each other. The son Sammy often runs away from home. The young daughter Pecola is ridiculed and shunned by peers, teachers and her own parents for her ugliness. Yet she yearns for blue eyes which she believed would make her beautiful and lovable.

At the other end is the McTeers, an equally black and poor but much more stable and loving family. Though the parents struggle hard to survive and are harsh with the children, there was much love in the family, “love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup”, (Morrison 14) even enough to take Pecola in after she has been driven outdoors by her drunkard father. The two McTeer girls, Freida and Claudia are the only friends that Pecola had in her life and it is Claudia who becomes one of the chief narrators of the tragic tale of Pecola. Claudia recalls how Pecola was fascinated by the Shirley Temple cup and would keep drinking three quarts of milk just to enjoy holding the cup. The onset of Pecola’s menstruation marks a great event in the lives of the three young girls.

Pecola’s budding womanhood arouses in her, a yearning for unraveling the mysteries of her sexuality only to be disappointed. Everyone despises her. Boys and girls make fun of her. Teachers ignore her and prefer light skinned girls like Maureen Peal. She is driven away from the house of the neat Black middle class family of Geraldine. Pauline Breedlove who is crazy for white values truly hates her for her extreme ugliness and Blackness.

Pecola feels that the acquisition of blue eyes will certainly make her the most beautiful of all girls in the community and bestow on her all the love and attention she is deprived of. However, Claudia has no such infatuation for ‘white’ things. In fact, she is confused about the idea of considering ‘white’ as beautiful. She cannot tolerate the golden haired, blue-eyed, pink-skinned dolls that she receives at Christmas. She tears the dolls to find the secret of her beauty and feels the same

desire toward white girls. But everyone around her loves and aspires to be ‘white’, including Pecola. Pecola’s chaotic life takes a hideous turn when she is raped by her own father in a drunken fit. Her obsession with blue eyes leads her to Soaphead Church, the spiritual fraud to seek the fulfillment of her dream. Soaphead Church grants her wish though he makes it certain that only she can see it. Pecola becomes insane. The novel ends with Pecola giving birth to a still-born premature baby and wasting herself away in madness.

The novel tells a simple story but the simplicity underlies grave and complex issues about Black and white race relations. Racism is the feeling of the inherent superiority of one race over another. Though racism as an ideology no more holds power, the implicit notion of the inherent inferiority of Blacks has survived long enough to perpetuate the justness of power and privilege of white over the Blacks. The various institutions of the society, political, legal, cultural, educational manifest this domination. The white culture manipulates the differences in racial features of the Blacks, i.e. their black skin color, woolly hair, thick nose and lips to establish. its superiority over them. Blacks develop a deep frustration and self-hatred for their inferiority. This results in a total destruction of the self-image of the Blacks.

The problem is greater for the Black women who suffer from powerlessness in the black and white world due to their position of being woman as well as black and ugly. Morrison tells Gloria Naylor: “It wasn’t that easy being a little black girl in this country. It was rough. The psychological tricks you have to play in order to get through and nobody said how it felt.” (Guthrie 199) An assessment carried out in the 60s where young black girls were asked to grade pictures of the slogan ‘Black is Beautiful’ resounded throughout the 60s in the United States. Contradicting the Black power concept of the 1960s which she felt was as unrealistic as the white notions of Black inferiority, Morrison warns against the predicament that beset the black in depending on physical appearances:

When the strength of a race depends on its beauty, when the focus is turned to know how one looks as opposed to what one is, we are in trouble. (Morrison 30)

Morrison clearly reveals to Charles Ruas, her intention in bringing out the story of a young Black girl’s quest for blue eyes:

I began to write about a girl who wanted blue eyes and the horror of having that with fulfilled and also about the whole business of what is physical beauty and the pain of that yearning and wanting to be somebody eve and how devastating that was and yet part of all females who were peripheral in other people’s lives. (30)

In her essay, Cynthia Davis’s examination of Jean Paul Sartre’s views of identity and power relations espoused in his seminal book Being and Nothingness provides us more insight on Morrison’s characters in her novels. Jean Paul Sartre writes:

Human relations revolve around the experience of “the look”, for being “seen” by another both confirms one’s reality and threaten one’s sense of freedom. “I grasp the Other’s look at the very centre of my act as the solidification and alienation of my own” possibilities. Alone, I can see myself as pure consciousness in a world of possible objects; The Other’s look makes me see myself in another perception. “The other as a look is only that – my transcendence transcended”. If I can make the other into an object in my world I can “transcend” him. Thus my project of recovering myself is fundamentally a project of absorbing the Other. (Draper 218)

Failure to regulate such relationships results in “Bad Faith” which affects individuals within “a society based on coercive power relations” and lead to their problems of identity. (218) Such are the characters that Morrison portrays in the novel. Their inability “to define themselves through the eyes of others” and also “by eternalizing the “Look” (218) of the majority culture” results in the fragmentation of their selves.

Everywhere in the novel, white-skin, blond hair and blue eyes become the criteria for beauty. Naturally a poor Black child like Pecola who is scorned by everyone for her ugliness and Blackness must desire blue eyes to be acceptable and loved by those around her:

It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures and knew the sights, if those eyes of hers were different, if she looked different, may be Cholly would be different and Mrs Breedlove too. (Morrison 40)

It kindles in her, a fondness for pretty white ideals of beauty like Shirley Temple and Mary Janes projected by the media. As she drinks milk from the Shirley

100

Temple mug, “she was a long time with the milk and gazed fondly at the silhouette of Shirley Temple’s dimpled face.” (19) She buys the Mary Jane candies because “To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, Eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane, Be Mary Jane.” (43)

One may question why Pecola, of all the others characters in the novel is portrayed as the ugliest of the ugly. It is how the value system defines her. Morrison brings in the mirror motif, one which is repeated throughout her subsequent novels:

Long hours she sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school by teachers and classmates alike. (39)

Mirrors to Morrison serve as destructive devices to reinforce the Black Women’s sense of her lack against the projection of white controlling images of perfection and beauty. Pecola’s vision of her ugliness in the mirror illustrates the internalization of the sense of inferiority that has so far been the goal of the dominant culture. Pecola submits to “the Look” of the dominant culture which defines her as an object and accepts “an external definition of the self”. (Draper 218 ) The result is that:

Thrown in this way, into the binding connection that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She could see what there was to see. The eyes of other people. (40)

For her, blue eyes become the door to a world of love and fulfillment. However she fails to realize that the idealized world of the Dick and Jane fairy tale she learns about in school will never feature in the grim picture of her abused life. Deprived of the nurturing influence of her community, Pecola suffers a speedy disintegration of her selfhood. The loss of identity brings about a thorough emotional and psychological distortion which culminates in her tragedy. Pecola’s final appearance at the end of the novel, walking among the waste and looking for lost things marks the agonizing end to the sad story of an innocent girl’s quest for identity.

While it is primarily the story of Pecola, the novel is also the story of other characters who suffer from a similar fragmentation of selfhood. Pecola is victimized by various characters who are themselves victims of serious cultural and social

101

oppression. To begin with, the seed of Pecola’s tragedy had been sown in the lives of her parents. Her father, Cholly Breedlove is a depiction of rejection.

His rejection begins right from the moment of his birth when his father deserts him at his birth and his insane mother leaves him in a junk heap. He is rescued and brought up by his great aunt Jimmy but he is not destined to enjoy her affection because she dies when he is just fifteen. At his aunt’s funeral, Cholly becomes attracted to his cousin Darlene. His first sexual experience with her is intruded upon by the white hunters who force them to ‘perform’ for their fun. This sexual humiliation cripples his manhood. He turns his hatred, not to the white men but to Darlene.

Davis says “Morrison shows ‘the Look’ taking on monstrous proportions as the humiliated black male allies himself with the Third, i.e. the white culture by making the black women the object of his displaced fury.”(Draper 220) The Black man’s desire to control and protect the Black woman represents his efforts to reconstruct himself. Cholly’s anger results from his humiliating objectification in the presence of his woman:

He hated the one who had created the situation the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence. The one whom he had not been able to protect, to spare to cover from the round moon of the flashlight. (Morrison 119) His hatred for Darlene turns into fear about her possible pregnancy. He takes to flight, giving back to the world the rejection that he had experienced. The cycle of rejection becomes complete when his search for his real father ends with the latter’s cruel disowning of him. It results in the birth of a new Cholly – a man dangerously free. Bereft of all communal ties which hold life together, he had “nothing more to lose. He was alone with his perceptions and appetites and they alone interested him.” (125-126) He fails to find happiness with Pauline or fulfill his responsibilities as a father because “Nothing, nothing interested him.” (186) Cholly is another victim of both white oppression and its offshoot, Black oppression. He becomes an embodiment of alienation and self hatred. He tries to subsist himself by living a life of depravity. Thus the circumstances of his life had deprived him of his capacity for any healthy expression of his emotions. His dehumanization culminates in his rape of his own daughter. He becomes “dog Breedlove” and dies a dishonorable death. (117) While the negative father image becomes a factor

102

for Pecola’s own negation of the self, Pecola suffers from an equally destructive mother image.

Born in a rural Alabama family, Pecola’s mother, Pauline grew up as quiet girl, with a loneliness resulting from a physical deformity of her left foot. The yearning for a sense of unity found expression in her love of housekeeping and creative arranging of colors and things. Somehow, she never felt she belonged to any place. Her joy in her marriage to Cholly Breedlove was short lived. Their migration to the Northern Black community of Lorain led to her discovery that “Northern colored people were no better than whites in meanness.” (93)

Her frustration and alienation breaks up her relationship with Cholly. She seeks refuge for her isolation and unhappiness in the movies where she could transcend her reality and falsely identify herself with its illusionary dream world of love, beauty and perfection. She begins to dress up and make her hair like Jean Harlow. Pauline inhibits the minority cultural condition – the internalization of the dominant culture. Defined as the lesser, she begins on a quest for an external definition to regain her self-worth. A broken tooth tumbles down her dream image. But far from discovering her truth, it only serves to re-inforce her ugliness. “I settled down to being ugly.” (98) She accepts another image, which is of Polly, the faithful maid in the white Fishers’ home.

Her pride in her matchless housekeeping and control over other White and Black people who serve the Fishers promises her a desirable and respectable self, little aware of the fact that power and honor belonged to the Fishers and can never truly be hers. Her dependence on an external definition of the self can never endure. Her internalization of the gaze of the dominant culture develops in her a self-loathing which she projects to those around her. She hates Cholly for his evil ways.

She rejects Pecola for her ugliness right from her birth and while she showers her love on the white fishers’ girl, she could neglect her own child’s burns and even slap her for spoiling the sparking kitchen and frightening the Fisher’s child. The dearth or perversion of maternal love is illustrated by Pecola’s formal address to her as Mrs Breedlove. Pauline’s distorted quest for identity denies life and its joys. Losing herself in a world of images, she becomes an image herself and also turns Pecola into one. It destroys her identity and brings the same predicament for Pecola.

103

In Geraldine, Morrison creates another interesting character that represents the stereotype of typical Black middle-class women who aspire for the white bourgeois values in order to fit themselves into the scheme of the white society:

They go to land-grant colleges, normal schools, and learn how to do the white man’s work with refinement. (68)

Geraldine is another example of the internalization of the dominant society’s concept – the sense of inferiority resulting in self hatred. She also seeks an eternal self definition which conforms to the white values. In striving to become and defend her perfect image, she stifles her selfhood and kills the spontaneous spirit of life:

Wherever it erupts, this Funk, they wipe it away; where it crusts, they dissolve it; wherever it drips, flowers, or clings, they find it and fight it until it dies In short, how to get rid of the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions. (68)

According to Susan Willis, Geraldine embodies the “social and psychological aspects that characterize the lived experience of historical transition of Black America.” (Guthrie 310) Uprooted from his rural setting, the urban black experienced alienation in his rural setting and also experienced alienation in his new world. His attempt to find access to the white society meant an alienation from his cultural roots and repression of his Black self.

This is what typifies the lives of people like Geraldine. She severs her cultural connection and instructs her son Louis. Thus she tells him “Colored people were neat and quiet; niggers were dirty and loud.” (Morrison 71)

She represses her Black identity under the false exterior of a neat colored lady, her beautiful home and affluence. Geraldine’s self-denial results in a complete degradation of her humanity and repression of even the joy of sexual fulfillment with her husband or maternal affection for her son who becomes as perverted as her. To her, Pecola represents all what she fears and abhors in herself and strives hard to erase. Thus she drives out the instant she discovers her in her house. Thus Geraldine is a depiction of a character whose negation of the self which leads to a complete falsification of life and its values.

Elihue Micah Whitcomb is a light-skinned man from the West Indies whose family roots combine the blood of three races, African, Asian and English. Like any

104

admirer of white culture, he and his family believes that “all civilizations derive from the white race, that none can exist without its help and that a great society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves the blood of the noble group that created it.” (133)This sense of whiteness and contempt for others leads to a denial of life’s spontaneity and urges. Such distortion moulds him into a misanthrope. He cleverly hides his perversion under the facade of a life of strict moral discipline and restraint. He becomes a spiritual advisor who helps people with spiritual advice and solutions. However, we discover that he is a molester of little girls and plays dirty games with them. But in his own view, “He was what one might call a very clean old man.” (132)

The name ‘Soaphead Church’ ironically comments on his hypocritical nature. He exploits poor Pecola for his own evil intensions of killing his mangy dog. Soaphead and all other characters in the novel suffer from what Kwame Nkrumah defined as the crisis of the African personality – Africans bereft of their own national identity that they exhibit distorted, even psychopathic behavioral patterns. (Mbalia 32)

From the above analysis, we can observe that each character in the novel experiences a deep alienation and corruption of the self as they live under social and cultural oppression. The devaluation and exclusion of the Black self that racism perpetuates leads to a total violation and distortion of identity and healthy expression of emotions and relationships. In contrast, the character of Claudia MacTeer stands apart from all the characters who allow themselves to suffer such victimization.

Like Pecola, Claudia is aware of the overpowering influence of white cultural values all around her which enforces a negative perception of African American values. No wonder, “Those children who are most white are prized by parents and teachers alike.” (61) But while “adults all argued that a pink-skinned doll was what every girl treasured, (22) she feels disgust for such a gift. Curious to discover the secret of its lovability, she tears its apart and feels the same urge toward white girls. Maureen Peal’s insulting remarks about her ugliness and blackness sends her brooding about her “lesser” position. The distaste for white girls and dolls makes her and Frieda pray and wait for Pecola’s Black baby by planting marigold seeds in the ground. However, the seeds die and so does Pecola’s baby. Claudia later concludes:

105

This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late. (160)

Claudia’s conclusion of the reason for the failure of marigolds to sprout in the unyielding earth is a symbolic comment on the reversal of every possibility in the social order for the survival of the Black self. In course of time, Claudia learns to compromise in order to accommodate herself into the world of white values. But she will never be a victim as Pecola. Definitely the familial love and nurturing that Claudia revived could sustain her against all adds to which Pecola, deprived of such nourishment, succumbed. Looking back, the adult Claudia sees Pecola’s consuming person for an external definition which caused her downfall. But worse still, she condemns the whole community for Pecola’s unfortunate fate, for making her its scapegoat:

All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us – all who knew her – felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. (159)

Further, Michael Awkward in his essay, “The Evil of Fulfillment: Scapegoating and Narration in The Bluest Eye,” refers to Eric Neumann’s observations about ‘scapegoating’ which arises out of the need of the individual and group projection of the ‘shadow’ or its failure to conform to the acknowledged social order to an external object. The feeling of guilt or failure, according to Neumann, splits the self into the good, desirable unshadowed ideal self and the evil, undesirable, shadowed Black self. The novel shows how such splits in the Black psyche results in a deep self-contempt and the resultant scapegoating the occurs as a function of what Neumann terms as “the projection of the shadow.” (Gates and Appiah 191)

The Black boys’ insulting remarks to Pecola represent their attempt to cleanse themselves off by projecting onto Pecola, their own shadow i.e. the shameful reality of their own lives. Pauline’s hatred and expulsion of Pecola represent their efforts to exorcise their own imperfections and unworthiness and failures.

106

Thus, Morrison’s main concern in the novel is the brutal reality of racism and the painful efforts of Blacks for self definition in a society which denies them their worth. Karen Carmean writes, “The Bluest Eye illustrates the possible consequences of entirely depending on external conditions for self-image, for in attempting to satisfy a paradigm that differs so radically from reality, African- Americans may destroy their essential nature.” (28) Depicting Pecola’s cultural alienation which caused her tragedy, Morrison focuses on the importance of communal nourishment and acceptance for one’s wholeness. In spite of her initial confusion, a mature Claudia finally comes to discover the ‘how and why’ of Pecola’s downfall which will definitely help her confront the various odds in her quest for an authentic Black self.

2. Sula (1973)

In her second novel Sula, (1973) Toni Morrison takes us away from the world of Black young girls to that of the adult world of Black women and examines the possibilities for the Black woman in the achievement of her identity against the limitations of the society around her.

Morrison reveals to Gloria Naylor, the circumstances relating to the publication of The Bluest Eye which sparked the creation of the characters of Sula and Nel:

After I finished that book I was in some despair because several months passed and I didn’t have another idea. And then I got to thinking about this girl, this woman. If it wasn’t unconventional, she didn’t want it. She was willing to risk in her imagination a lot of things and pay the price and also go astray. It wasn’t as though she was this fantastic power who didn’t have a flaw in her character. I wanted to throw her relationship with another woman into relief. Those two women – that too is us, those two desires, to have your adventure and safety, so I just cut it up and then to have one do the unforgivable thing to see what that friendship was really made of. (Guthrie 200)

The novel narrates the tale of a small isolated Black community of the Bottom in Medallion, Ohio during the years 1919 to 1965. The story opens with a description of the destruction of the Bottom for the construction of the Medallion city Golf course which is followed by a recollection of its history. The Bottom as we

107

discover, originated as a nigger joke. Once a white master promised a reward of freedom and land to his Black slave for an outstanding service.

The slave achieved freedom but the Promised Land turned out to be a piece of rocky barren land on the hill. However the master convinced the bewildered slave that it was “the bottom of Heaven – best land there is” called the Bottom.” (Morrison 5) Life was hard. “Still it was lovely up in the Bottom” because the people were stoic enough to find joy in the midst of hardships. (5) They tell their ‘nigger joke’ when they are looking for a little comfort somewhere and because “laughter was part of the pain.” (4-5) In course of time, the Black community of Bottom develops its own distinctive values for survival.

The story introduces us to the town’s crazy World War II veteran. Shadrack. Shadrack’s experience of the brutality and bloodshed in the war results in a permanent and severe mental shock. After two years of treatment in an asylum, he returns to the Bottom as a lunatic. Shadrack does not fear death or dying but the unexpectedness of both. “In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year was devoted to it, everybody would be safe and free.” (14) Thus he initiates National Suicide Day when he walks a solitary march with a cowbell and a hangman’s rope exhorting the people on third January every year. In the beginning, Shadrack and his activities frighten the people of the Bottom but soon they learn to accept him and his madness and “fit him so to say, into the scheme of things.” (15) Shadrack’s neurotic attitude symbolizes the Bottom’s own attempts to construct a certain system to bring order into their lives and ensure their survival. Against the backdrop of such a community, Morrison depicts the lives of the Peace and the Wright families and their two girls, Sula Peace and Nel Wright.

Nel’s mother, Helene is the daughter of a Creole prostitute and is born in a brothel. After she marries Wiley Wright, she gives birth to a daughter, and she wants to create a respectable life for her daughter by severing her dishonorable ancestral ties. She is successful in it and feels glad. However, during a trip south to New Orleans to attend the funeral of her grandmother, Nel witnesses the disgusting spectacle of her respectable mother turning into “custard” (22) under the gaze of the white train conductor who insults her by calling her “gal.” (20) Returning home, Nel makes an important decision. She decides to recreate herself as an independent self.

108

“I’m me. I’m not their daughter. I’m not Nel. I’m me.” (28) This new sense of an independent self makes her bold enough to move out of her sheltered and constricting existence and become friends with Sula Peace.

The Peaces’ home on Carpenter’s Road is sharply contrasted with the Wrights’ home. Sula’s grandmother Eva is a tough survivor of a racist and sexist society. After desertion by her husband Boy, she has to struggle with three small children and practically no money or food. After using the last bit of lard in her kitchen to dig into her son’s bottom to save him from dying of constipation, she leaves her children in the care of a neighbor and disappears. Eva returns after eighteen months, with only one leg and crutches but with an income, substantial enough to leave her shabby cabin and build a new big house of many rooms, doors and staircases. (30)

Eva lives in such a house with her children, Hannah and Plum, her grandchild Sula, the adoptions, three different boys collectively called the Deweys, Tar Baby, a white alcoholic bachelor and boarders consisting of friends and newly married couples. Ensconced in her wagon in her bedroom, Eva is the matriarchal power, “The creator and sovereign” who rules over her domain “directing the lives of her children, friends, strays and a constant stream of boarders. (30)

In Eva, Morrison does not portray the traditional, loving and passive plantation ‘mammy’ but a highly complex Black female character who is tough, defiant and independent. Eva’s hatred for her husband becomes the sustaining principle of her life because it helps her “to define and strengthen her or protect her from routine vulnerabilities” and “it was hating him that kept her alive and happy.” (37) She reclaims herself through her defiance and vengeance against the patriarchal force that tried to destroy her. But while she hates her husband, Eva loves other men and is constantly surrounded by her male admirers. However she is never an object of their pleasure. Instead, they become toys for her to indulge “in a lot of pecking, teasing and laughter. So those Peace women loved all men. It was manlove that Eva bequeathed to her daughters.” (41)

After the death of her husband Rekus, Eva’s daughter, Hannah comes along with her daughter, Sula to live with Eva. Although, she never intends to re-marry, Hannah indulges in a number of sexual relations with the husbands of her friends.

109

Hannah’s sexuality is unique. It is devoid of artifice and undemanding because “all she wanted was just some touching everyday.” (44) She rarely sleeps with her lovers because she avoids any commitment. Born in such a world bursting with unconventional freedom and sexuality, young Sula is a lost soul until she meets Nel.

When Sula and Nel meet, they have many similarities, “they were both twelve in 1922, wishbone thin and easy-assed” and both, the single child of matriarchal families. (52) “However their striking similarity was their emotional alienation” because neither “had close attachment to family.” (Evans 363) Helen’s pursuit of respectability restricts real warmth for her daughter Nel. Likewise, the circumstances of the Peace family deprive Sula of conventional love and nurturing. The emotional isolation resulting from the dearth of love and intensified by the restrictions of their color and sex in the world outside draws them together:

Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be. Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on. Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers (Sula’s because he was dead; Nel’s because he wasn’t), they found in each other’s eyes the intimacy they were looking for. (Morrison 52)

Each becomes for the other, her dream companion. But their characters show a marked contrast to each other rather than similarities. Nel’s cool and conventional nature contrasts with Sula’s unusual and impulsive character. But such contradictions become the reason for their friendship. Nel provides Sula with a sense of direction and stability in her freedom. Sula inspires Nel to explore her imagination and passions.

According to Nana Banyiwa Horne in Patrick Byrce Bjork’s critical study “Sula The contradictions of self and place,” Sula and Nel experience total harmony when they are together and that therefore “… neither… feels the need to assert her separate identity.” (68) Incomplete in themselves, they achieve wholeness in their friendship wherein they merge into a single self. Roberta Rubenstein describes it as a kind of psychological symbiosis (Gates and Appiah 134) where “the convergence of their divided selves” according to Banyiwa results in a “balanced, healthy

110

personality.” (Bryce 68) Nel and Sula’s “friendship was as intense as it was sudden” (Morrison 53) which Morrison describes to Gloria Naylor “as a spiritual bond.” (McKay 200)

Sula and Nel grow up together into womanhood, sharing their most intimate experiences of joy, fear, guilt and agony. Once on their way home from school, Sula and Nel are harassed by some white boys in the neighborhood. Sula pulls out a knife and cuts off the tip of her own finger to prove that “I can do that to myself, what you suppose I’ll do to you?” (54-55) While Nel seemed “stronger and consistent”, than Sula who is rash and impulsive, we also discover Sula’s fearlessness which contrasts with Nel’s passivity and timidity. (68)

In the chapter ‘1922,’ the image of a rich and fertile nature presages the blossoming sexuality of the two young girls. Their adolescent passions are stirred by the sight of the beautiful Black boys in the neighborhood. However their hope for fulfillment ends in disappointment. Sula overhears her mother admitting that “I love Sula but I don’t like her.” (57) Hannah’s remark signifies for Sula, a painful maternal rejection which increases her isolation. The two girls run to the river side and play digging the earth with twigs.

The episode focuses on the young girls’ exciting exploration of their budding womanhood which ameliorates the loneliness of their lives. Their game becomes symbolic of a ritualistic celebration of their emergent sexuality. Moments later, Sula tempts the young boy Chicken Little to climb a tree with her. As she playfully swings him, suddenly, the boy slips away and falls into the river below and drowns to death. Nel’s fear of someone watching sends a frantic Sula, running to the cabin of Shadrock who was the only possible witness to the incident. The mad Shadrack, obsessed with the fear of death, greets the sole guest in his life with the word ‘always,’ hoping to please and assure her of her permanency. However for Sula, his words suggest the guilt that would forever haunt her. Nel consoles that it was not her fault, but Sula becomes aware of the misery of life.

Months later, Hannah unfortunately dies a tragic death by fire. As her mother is consumed by flames, Sula doesn’t run to her rescue but watches “Hannah burn not because she was paralyzed, but because she was interested.” (78) Five years later, a turning point comes to their friendship. Nel meets Jude. Desperate to prove his

111

manhood, he proposes marriage to Nel. As the conventional male, Jude desires a woman to support and care for him. So he seeks Nel to complete himself “because the two of them together would make one Jude” (83) Nel’s heart reaches out to him and Jude becomes the most important person in her life. “And greater than her friendship with Sula was the feeling of being needed by someone who saw her singly.” (84) She is happy to be “the hem – the tuck and fold of his life,” (83) Nel’s marriage to Jude marks the ends of her long friendship with Sula. On the day of Nel’s wedding, Sula leaves Nel and the Bottom to pursue her own life. Sula returns to the Bottom after ten years of absence.

Her arrival is accompanied by a flight of robins which people fear to be a bad omen. Their fears prove true because immediately, Sula defies Eva’s insistence on marriage and motherhood because “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.” (92) Eva is shocked when she repudiates even God and threatens to burn her up. She disowns her aged grandmother by putting her in a charity home. While the community despises her presence, Nel is the only person who rejoices at her return. But her joy is short lived. She discovers Sula’s seduction of Jude. Jude abandons Nel. Nel is left to suffer the agony of betrayal of love by Jude and friendship by Sula.

The community condemns Sula as a disgraceful woman who wrecks marriages, disrespects its mores and worst of all, sleeps with white men. They shun her as “evil” or the “devil.” (117) On the other hand they improve their goodness.

Nel resigns herself to the burden of love and duty to her children but her life becomes a spiritless drudgery. In course of time, Sula meets Ajax. Sula’s unconventionality fascinates Ajax. Sula finds in Ajax one who loves flight and freedom, the perfect male counterpart of her liberated feminine self. They achieve a perfect unity which inspires in Sula, a yearning to make it lasting. “She begins to discover what possession is” and becomes vulnerable to it like Nel and the others whom she has earlier condemned. (131) The moment Ajax senses her possessive need, he deserts her. Sula suffers the pangs of absence she had earlier caused Nel. She discovers her inability to know the true name of Ajax which was A. Jacks. Sula becomes ill and is dying. Nel visits her. Nel tries to assert her own righteousness but Sula only mocks it and dies, justifying herself.

112

The community rejoices at Sula’s death. However, things get worse. The early frost kills the crops, epidemics spread and the people return to their bad habits. The following January, the angry inhabitants of the Bottom participate in Shadreck’s National Suicide Day celebration and march to the site of the tunnel where they were denied work and destroy it, bringing the collapse of the tunnel and their own death.

Twenty five years later Nel’s visit to Eva at the old home marks her realization of a truth. Sula was not as evil as she thought. Eva’s confusion of Sula with Nel and accusation of Nel for Chicken’s death enlightens her about her ignorance of her own repressed evil which have condemned Sula. The novel ends with Nel’s cries expressing her grief for having misunderstood Sula, and her loss of Sula.

Thus, Sula presents the story of two Black women characters whose different views about life and approaches to the achievement of selfhood lead to conflicts resulting in the fragmentation of their lives and relationships, pain, loss and death. Sula Peace is a woman who never finds her place in her community. As the narrator says, “she was distinctly different.” (118) It was this difference which the community or Nel never cared or in fact, feared to know which leads to her tragedy. Sula’s ‘differentness’ traces its source to the unique women-centered world where she belongs. Born and nurtured among tough and independent women who freed themselves from patriarchal domination and showed an unconventional attitude to commitment, relationships and sexuality, Sula emerges just like them, free, bold and unconventional. Quite early, she learns the hard lessons of life. The unfortunate rejection by her own mother and her accidental killing of Chicken Little assures her “of death and of the essential untrustworthiness and isolation of human beings”: (Stein 147)

Ever since her mother’s remarks sent her flying up those stairs, ever since her one major feeling of responsibility had been exercised on the bank of a river with a closed place in the middle. The first experience taught her there was no other that you could count on; the second that there was no self to count on either. She had no center, no speak around which to grow. (Morrison 119)

Nel’s friendship is the only meaningful attachment in her life. But Nel forsakes her for Jude. She drifts far away in quest of self-fulfillment but in vain. She

113

returns back to Nel because she was the only, who made her whole. “Nel was the closest to a self and the other.” (119) But she causes her pain when she sleeps with Jude, an act inspired by her habitual sexual nonchalance or simply an experimental attitude to life and its values. But Nel’s conventional morality accuses her of cruel betrayal. After Nel severs her bond with her, she loses her center of existence. Discovering the incertitude of life:

She was completely free of ambition with no money, no property or things, no greed, no desire to command attention or compliment – no ego. For that reason, she felt no compulsion to verify herself – be consistent with herself. (119)

It is in the flux of such indefiniteness and isolation that she constructs her identity:

She lived out her days, exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full reign, feeling an obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, to feel pleasure as to give pleasure, hers was an experimental life. (118)

Such an experimental attitude leads her to defy tradition and convention. To her marriage and motherhood are suicidal to the achievement of an independent female identity. She pities the married women of the Bottom whom she feels, live a death like existence. She fails to find pleasure in sexual relationships. Sex becomes boring to her and increases her isolation because its pleasure “was not eternity but the death of time and loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. A loneliness that never admitted the possibility of other people.” (124)

Left to herself, she seeks to love herself and her own isolation. “Resisting human ties, she is the daring, sensuous, active woman, seeking to experience life and her own being to the fullest.” (Stein 147)She gives to herself a boundless freedom to pursue the fullest exploration and fulfillment of the self. Sula insisting on her independence becomes isolated from the society, she is free but directionless. (141) Such narcissism becomes selfishness and brings self- destruction which her death illustrates.

In contrast to the character of Sula is the character of Nel. Nel is the typical conventional woman. Once Nel dreamt of an independent self and pursued it together

114

with Sula but ironically, Nel lets her dream die. As Nel grows up, she learns to live according to the terms set down by the community. She marries Jude and bears his children. Jude marries her because “he needed some of his appetites filled, some posture of adulthood recognized” and “sees himself forming in her eyes.” (Morrison 82-3) She sacrifices herself for the sake of her husband and children and becomes dependent on them for her identity. To quote Patrick Bjork Byrce, “Nel becomes exactly what the community wishes her to be. It is an all too familiar process of comodification wherein Nel in used for the gratification and reinforcement of patriarchal order.” (73) Sula is sad because Nel too has become one of those women:

A spider who dangled in the dark dry place suspended by their own spittle more terrified of the free fall than the snake’s breath below. (120)

When Jude abandons her, her life crumbles. After the loss of Jude, she loses her identity. (110) She cries that her things are empty. As Keith E Byerman writes in his critical essay on Morrison’s novels, “Beyond Realism”:

Having his name and body gave her an acceptable place in the community. The absence of the phallus means a loss of status in the social order. She now becomes a “woman without a man” and unable to raise her eye. (Guthrie 110)

Contrary to Sula’s exploratory attitude to life, Nel concludes, “Hell ain’t things lasting forever. Hell is change”. (Morrison 108) For her, life becomes “a gray ball hovering just there,” “Quiet, gray, dirty” (109) which she fears and tries hard to avoid touching it. Sula’s act strips Nel of her illusions of life. But whereas the contradictions of life inspire exploration for Sula, Nel is terrified to confront the truth of her miserable and unrealistic existence. She continues her death like existence.

Towards the latter part of the story, Nel’s meeting with Sula marks the final confrontation of their contradictory approaches to life. Both Sula and Nel suffer from loss and pain. Sula’s physical death parallels Nel’s spiritual death. But Sula claims herself “going down like one of those redwoods,” whereas Nel and her lot are “dying like a stump.” (143) Their conversation reveals how Sula exults in living out her own life and isolation and asserts, till the last breadth of her life, not Nel’s but her own goodness.

115

Nel’s confrontation with Sula marks the confrontation between the community’s and Sula’s ideology. Sula’s remarks question the conventional concepts of good and evil and strip the community off its hypocrisy. “By ignoring or deliberately violating the conventions, she threatens the assumptions by which life is organized and made meaningful.” (109) Morrison highlights the Black community’s self-aggrandizement and its distinctive philosophy to combat the pain and the dehumanization of its life:

There was no creature so ungodly as to make them destroy it. They could kill easily if provoked to anger, but not by design, which explained why they could not “mob kill” anyone. To do so was not only unnatural, it was undignified. The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over. (118)

Identifying, her as evil becomes way for the community to control and deal with her ‘differentness’. It also serves them a means to validate their ability to survive the larger oppression of the dominant culture. In order to prove her evil, they project all their evil on her. She becomes a scapegoat. “She was pariah then, and she knew it.” (122) On the other hand, they become good. They use her evil to define their goodness. Thus Sula inspires goodness in the community. Describing Sula’s position in the novel, Morrison writes:

The black community is a pariah community. Black people are pariahs. The civilization of black people that lives apart from but in juxtaposition to other civilization is a pariah relationship. In fact the concept of the black in this country is almost always one of the pariah. But a community contains within it that are very useful for the conscience of the community. (Guthrie 168)

The community feels relief at the death of Sula. However her death makes things worse. The people return to their bad ways and natural calamities follow. Shadrack also loses faith in his National Suicide Day ritual to overpower death because, inspite of his efforts, his beloved Sula dies. Morrison shows the Bottom’s narrow vision of survival rooted in a fear of life. Such a view negates life itself which is symbolized by the mass death of the people at the tunnel.

The demolition of the Bottom and the cemetery which stands as its only remaining relic further highlights its self destruction:

116

True, when one, not able to destroy evil, one must try to outlast it. But human beings have to demand, more from life than mere survival, or they may not survive at all. To really live life, there must be some imagination, some exploration, so there can be some creative action. (Gates and Appiah 94)

This is what the community ignores and what Nel finally learns. Towards the end, Nel’s meeting with Eva marks Nel’s self discovery. Eva’s confusion of Nel’s with Sula and her accusation of Nel’s involvement in Chicken’s death opens Nel’s eyes to her own truth. All the while, she has believed in Sula’s evil whereas her own moral pretensions prevent her from acknowledging her own capacity for evil. Sula has lived and died with her own truth while she has lived in self-deception. She sadly realizes that it was not Jude but Sula whom she had been missing all along:

“We was girls together,” she said as though explaining something. “Oh Lord, Sula,” she cried, “girl, girl girl girl girl.” It was a fine cry – loud and long –but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow. (174)

Nel’s cries lament her loss of Sula and their friendship. But it also reflects her painful realization of her loss of her own self. Nel’s self knowledge marks her rebirth and re-initiation into the quest for her self-definition. Karen F. Stein writes:

By admitting, the guilt she had tried to deny and recognizing her failure of sympathy for her friend, Nel comes to terms with herself and frees her emotional capacity. Thus, Nel, the cautious, conventional woman, leaves the meaning of Sula’s life and survives. (Stein 149)

To quote Karla Holloway, “this was not a book about women bonding to each other. Instead it was a book about each woman bonding to self, to a sense of ‘herself’ as woman.” (68)

Holloway further interprets Sula as an ideal of the African concept of female creative potential which manifest a unity with nature, an embodiment of African spirituality within a culture whose survival threatens African values. The thorny, fire- color of her rose, the watery tadpole, earthbound snake which are seen in her birthmark on her forehead manifest the essential African archetypes of fire, water and ground. Sula thus represents an Earth mother who renews, sustains and consumes herself : (69-70)

117

If Morrison warns us against women like this, it is because Sula carries these archetypes in a hostile land. The Bottom signifies America’s repression and destructiveness and untrustworthiness. It offers the placebo of silence to girls like Nel who wander away from their dreams, and make the survival of African women like Sula difficult and fraught with pain and sorrow. (70)

Morrison sees Sula’s pursuit of such extreme feminine power within the oppressive white culture transforming into a dangerous freedom that contradict the very essence of Black womanhood rooted in the connection to community and responsibility. (Guthrie 68) Morrison observes Sula as a masculine character whose quality of masculinity, during those days, was a total outrage and she cannot get away with that – unless she were in a strange or alien environment which would be the theatre world of women like Bellie Holiday and Bessie Smith who lived extraordinary lives. (Guthrie 27) Thus the narrator says:

Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or string; had she anything to engage the restlessness and pre-occupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous. (121)

But her isolation exhausts even her imagination and creativity and she says “There aren’t any more new songs and I have sung all the ones there are. I have sung them all. I have sung all the songs there are.” (137)

Summing up, Nel’s character represents the order and repression of our rational, conscious self while Sula signifies our dark and mysterious dream and unconscious self. (Gates 137) The mysterious birth mark which is interpreted in various ways by the other characters in the novel and remains elusive to everybody symbolizes her elusive, mysterious character. In her interview to Robert Stepto, “Intimate things in place,” Morrison says:

There was a bit of both in each of those two women, and if they had been one person I suppose they would have been rather a marvelous person. But each one lack something that the other one had. (Guthrie 13)

To conclude, Morrison’s story of the unique friendship of two Black women demonstrates the need for the synthesis of imagination with practicality, the struggle for survival with the joy of living, dreams with reality, vision with realization,

118

freedom with responsibility and liberty with boundary in the Black woman’s search of her identity as a Black and a woman in America.

3. Song of Solomon (1977)

While her first two novels, the Bluest Eye and Sula were works that centred on the lives of the Black woman and her quest for identity, Morrison’s third novel ‘Song of Solomon’ presents a shift of her vision from the Black woman’s world to that of the Black man. Here Morrison continues to dwell on the theme of quest as she focuses on the Black man’s search for the achievement of his black self.

Morrison wrote this novel when her personal life faced various challenges such as financial problems, two growing sons and also the death of her father. Morrison definitely found it challenging to work on a story with a male protagonist. Thus she had to look for models from the men in her family including her grandfather. Song of Solomon brings together some of the striking elements of Black American culture, classical mythology, European American literary style and Christianity. It was published in 1977 and became one of her most popular and acclaimed works. It won the National Book Critic Circle award for fiction for that year and also featured in the New York Times Book review.

The novel revolves around the story of a young Black man called Milkman and traces his gradual maturation into Black manhood. Macon Dead is a wealthy Black capitalist who lives in Michigan. He builds a successful real estate business and becomes the richest man in the town. He defines life and people in terms of money ‘who distort life, bend life for the sake of gain’. (New Dimensions 113) He marries his wife Ruth for money and status. His son, Macon Dead Jr., nicknamed Milkman is a disinterested and alienated boy. Milkman only joy comes from visiting his aunt Pilate who is regarded as “ugly, dirty, poor and drunk” but who is neither drunk nor dirty. (38)

Pilate introduces Milkman to the joys of home which he had never known in his own. His falls in love with his cousin Hagar, the granddaughter of Pilate. But his meanness and selfishness makes him repay Pilate’s love by conspiring with his father and Guitar to steal her sack which he thinks, contains the gold she and his father discovered and left in a cave in Pennsylvania. To their disappointment, the

119

sack turns out to contain, not gold but human bones, and they end up being arrested. He becomes ashamed of his lowly deed when Pilate rescued him from the police. Gradually he begins to feel a deep confusion in his life. His life seems meaningless and he desperately yearns to escape from it. He decides to leave Michigan to find the treasure that Pilate left in the cave in Pennsylvania. He hopes that gold will liberate him from his family and responsibilities and give him a new sense of identity; little knowing that he would soon be seeking something other than gold and reach an unexpected turn in his life.

Milkman’s decision to move out of his death like existence signals an important turning point in his life. But he is yet to understand the true concept of freedom. He is just like the male Peacock which he sees, which cannot fly because of “too much tail. He feels that gold will liberate him from his family and responsibilities and give him a new sense of identity; little knowing that he would soon be seeking something other than gold and reach an uncharted destination of his life.

In the second half of the novel, Milkman moves from the northern urban black world of Michigan to the rural South, from where it becomes a quest story.

The fairy tale reference of Hensel and Gretel’s discovery of the house of the candies in the woods highlights the deceptive nature of Milkman’s quest for the gold.

The people at Danville warmly receive him as though he was one of them returning home. Reverend Cooper and the men give him information about his family history. Milkman further meets the extra-ordinarily old and wise woman Circe who provides further details about his past, the name of his grandmother Sing who came from Shalimer, misspelled as Charlemange and his grandfather Jake. Circe inspires Milkman’s racial consciousness. In fact Circe “is a living relic of the past. With Circe, the past reaches out and intrudes on Milkman’s present as surely as Circe reaches out to embrace him.” (Lee 5) Circe directs him to the cave where the gold is supposed to be. Unable to find the gold in the cave, Milkman now heads for Virginia, the initial home of his ancestors.

Shalimer marks another important point of contact with the elemental African life and values and a critical phase of Milkman’s spiritual education:

120

In the town, he for the first time is the alien. For here, his city clothes, city talk and city values are not privileged. He is not taken as one returning to his roots but as a threatening white-hearted presence. (Gates & Appiah)

Interestingly, just after a few minutes of his arrival in Shalimer, he sees some children playing a game and singing a song, “Jay the only son of Solomon. Come booba yalle, come booba tambee.” (Morrison 264)

Through a series of experiences in the Shalimer community, Milkman is stripped of his false egotism and achieves his authentic self. His ignorant and offensive comments about the Shalimer men and their women lands him in a fight. It teaches him that his snobbishness does not permit him to disregard people. Thus, his participation with the older men on a hunt becomes another initiation rite.. In the dark wilderness, far away from civilization, Milkman contemplates on his past and present. He realizes his selfishness:

He thought he deserved only to be loved from a distance though - and given what he wanted. And in return he would be what – pleasant? Generous? May be all he was saying ‘I’m not responsible for your pain. Share your happiness with me but not your pain. (280)

He regrets his inhuman treatment of Hagar after he realizes the significance of human connection. In the darkness, he experiences a metaphorical death that releases him from an alienating self-centeredness:

Under the moon, on the ground, with not even the days to remind him that he was with other people, his self-cocoon that was personality – gave way. He could barely see his own hand and couldn’t see his feet. He was only his breadth. Coming slower now and his thoughts. (277)

The release from alienation brings him the knowledge that life is defined, not by wealth or status but the fundamental human potential for struggle and survival, “what he was born with and had learned to use. And endurance.” (277) He is able to commune with the animals, the trees and the earth, to feel them and listen to their language:

It was all language. An extension of the click people made in their check back home when they wanted a dog to follow them. No. It was not language. It was

121

what there was before languages. Before things were written down. Language in the time when men and animals did talk to one another. (278)

His sixth sense perceives Guitar’s approach to kill him and save himself from almost a dying situation. After his death experience, a new Milkman is born. The spiritual development culminates in his rebirth.

The experience of love with Sweet introduces Milkman to the healing and reciprocal nature of human relationships.

He remembers his family and misses Pilate the most. He now understands and feels a sudden rush of affection for the people in his family whom he had been so desperate to leave.

He does not yet know of Hagar’s death but he admits his inhuman treatment to her. As he hears the song of the children for a second time, he discovers it to be a version of Pilate’s song ‘O Sugarman, done fly away. (5) He gathers from Susan Byrd, the Indian woman that Solomon was his ancestor who actually flew back to Africa taking his youngest son Jake but finally dropping him. His wife Ryna, left with twenty-one children became mad with misery and the children were taken under the care of Heddy, an Indian woman. Her own child Sing went away with Jake from Shalimer in a wagon carrying slaves to Danville, Pennsylvania. Now the fragmented pieces of his past become a coherent whole. He recognizes the importance of names. On the way back home, the road signs he saw told stories of the many names and lives that were buried underneath:

The Alongquins had named the territory he lived in Great Water, michi gami. How many dead lives and fading memories were buried in and beneath the names of the places in this country. Under the recorded names were other names, just as “Macon Dead,” recorded for all time in some dusty file, hid from view the real names of people, places, and things. (329)

The retrieval of names leads Milkman to discover his identity. Now, he identifies himself with Solomon, his flying ancestor. His lifelong fascination about flight has turned out to be a tangible legacy of his ancestors. However, his identification with his flying ancestor also points to a contrast. Unlike Solomon whose flight and freedom abandoned his family and community, Milkman discovers

122

flight through his journey into his community and lineage. The abandonment of alienation and connection to his heritage enables him to know and define himself.

Milkman returns home, a changed person and brings Pilate back to Solomon’s leap to bury the bones of her father. Sadly, Pilate is shot at by Guitar’s bullet intended for Milkman. In his final moments Milkman sings the song of Pilate but his own version addresses “O Sugar girl – done fly away.” (340) He laments for Pilate who had guided him in his quest. Pilate dies, regretting only, her inability to love more people. The novel ends as a tearful Milkman rises and takes a sudden leap towards Guitar, not in anger but addressing him as a brother and offering him his life:

“Guitar!” he shouted. Tar tar tar, said the hills. “Over here, brother man! Can you see me?” Milkman cupped his mouth with one hand and waved the other over his head. “Here I am!” Am am am am, said the rocks. “You want me? Huh? You want my life?” Life life life life. (337) The novel ends on a note of ambiguity raising the question whether Milkman dies or not. However what signifies greater importance is the fact that the story hinges on Milkman’s achievement of the knowledge of an encompassing love that recognizes community and fellow-feeling against which the issues of death or survival becomes less serious concerns.

Morrison’s novel is a bildungsroman which focuses on the theme of the education or initiation of the protagonist into manhood, in this case Black manhood. Yet, the novel inverts the conventional western initiation pattern.

Whereas the classical American protagonist transcends his social limitations to achieve his independent and individualistic self, Morrison patterns a different initiation story in depicting the protagonist’s quest for his personal and racial identity in the context of his African ancestry and community. Milkman’s story of achievement of manhood shows a revision of the myth of the Black manhood. Morrison’s celebrates the freedom and mobility of Black men, and she also addresses

123

its contradictions for them:

who goes too far, whose adventures take him away… black men travel, they split, they get on trains, they walk, they move… It’s a part of black life, a positive, majestic thing, but there’s a price to pay-the price is the children. The fathers may soar, they may triumph, they may leave, but the children … remember, half in glory and half a accusation. (Guthrie 46)

She cannot ignore the Black women whose lives stand testimony to a struggle with responsibilities and burdens for their individual and collective survival. Contrary to the male “fraudulent freedom of their men, Black women seem to combine the “nest and adventure,” becoming “both safe and harbor and ship; they are both inn and trail, we black women, do both.” (114) “We don’t find these places, these roles, mutually exclusive.” (161) Thus Pilate is the powerful Black woman because “Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly. Milkman achieves real freedom.” (366) The discovery of his name ‘Milkman’ leads to his new identity, “For now he knew what Shalimer knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” (337) He represents both milk, a female source of nourishment and the male spirit of freedom. Morrison expresses this idea explicitly to Anne Koenan:

I want him to learn how to surrender, and to dominate – domination and surrender … women already know that surrender part, and can easily learn how to dominate … But what I wanted was a character who had everything to learn … This man, Milkman, has to walk into the earth – the womb – in that cave, then he walks on the surface of the earth and he can relate to its trees – that’s a; very maternal; - then he can go into the water … then he can bathe and jump in the air. (Guthrie 75-76)

Cynthia Davis comments on the meaning of Milkman’s flight “only in the recognition of his condition can he act in it, only in commitment is he free.” (Draper 221) The novel’s epigraph says, “The fathers may soar/and the children may know their names.”

It emphasizes the need for a synthesis of the spirit of those fathers who flew into freedom with those of their children who have to shoulder the responsibility of keeping their names and stories alive.

124

While the story of Milkman focuses on a connection to community and Black American folk heritage, Morrison depicts the character of Pilate as a powerful representation of such a cultural and communal connection. Self-born from a dead mother and without a navel, she is ostracized by her own Black people. Her isolation brings her great hardships and deprivations. At length “she threw away every assumption she learned and began at Zero.” (149) She cuts off her hair and struggles to survive and build a family single-handedly. She is the embodiment of strength, self-creation and determination. Her simple life characterized by spontaneity and freedom contrasts with the constricting materialism of Macon. Her woody smell and pebbly voice unravels to him the mysteries of the world. This woman who “looked like a tall, black tree” is the embodiment of black American culture and womanhood. (39)

The dark, fruity, joyful and the musical ambience of her home points to the life affirming aspects of Black life which educates Milkman. At one point in the story, we learn how Macon, once passing by Pilate’s house, is irresistibly drawn to the enthralling music made by the three women inside which stirs up his dead spirit. While the society shuns her, she “has a deep concern for and about human relationships.” (149) She instructs Milkman about the mysterious and spiritual aspect of Blackness. She initiates Milkman into African American values as a way for his moral and spiritual regeneration.

In contrast to Pilate’s character, other female characters in the novel are defined by their inability to achieve an authentic Black self such as Ruth Foster Dead, Hagar, Lena and Corianthians. The daughter of the first Black doctor in the Black community of Michigan, Ruth Foster also inherits the black bourgeois feature of the denial of the self. Such self denial leads to a perversion of her familial relation with her father. Macon charges her of having incestuous relationship with her father who delivered her two daughters and besides whose corpse she had laid and kissed the fingers. His contempt for her become a constant factor for the deprivation of love and sexual fulfillment in her marriage.

In a bid to save her marriage she undergoes great hardships and with the help of Macon’s resourceful sister Pilate, bears him a son but in vain. A tortured soul, Ruth silently seeks a refuge for her emotional and physical deprivation by suckling

125

her son even after he is four years old and visiting the grave of her father. The water mark on the mahogany table signifies her unfulfilled sorrowful life. Just as the vase of flowers is no longer present and leaves only its mark on the table where it stood, there exists only a haunting memory of her happy past with her father. “She becomes imprisoned in the circle of the past without any contact with the world outside or a hopeful perspective for her freedom.” (Morrison128) It also symbolizes her repressed existence under the materialistic exploitation of her husband who craves for the dominant capitalist values.

Hagar is another example of a character victimized by white values. Although Pilate is able to affirm her Black identity, she fails to nurture those Black values in her grandchild Hagar. Hagar is one of those young women who are infatuated by the myth of romantic love. Once she becomes Milkman’s lover, she immerses herself so completely in his love that she sees no other purpose in her life than to be loved. In fact, “her love denies any sense of self worth.” (Carmean 57) Milkman’s rejection of her leads to assume her Black American looks as the cause of her misery. Her mirror confirms her blackness and ugliness “Look at how I look. I look awful. No wonder he didn’t want me. I look terrible.” (Morrison 309) She goes on a day-long and passionate shopping mission in order to achieve the promise of beauty of the white commodity culture. Unfortunately the downpour washes away all her artificial make up and ruins her expensive dresses. It signifies the futility of such efforts to construct a false identity. Her death highlights the self destruction that the pursuit of such an unattainable self definition brings to the Black woman.

To sum up, Song of Solomon stresses on the need for the Black man to transcend the isolating western individualism and embrace his community and culture and heritage for the achievement of his Black identity.

126

Works Cited

Bjork, Patrick Bryce. The Novels of Toni Morrison: The Search for Self and Place Within the Community. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Print.

Carmean, Karen. Toni Morrison’s World of Fiction. Troy: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1993. Print.

Crayton, Lisa A. A Student’s Guide to Toni Morrison. Bekerley Heights: Enslow Publishers, Inc., 2006. Print.

David, Ron. Toni Morrison Explained: A Reader’s Road Map to the Novels. New York: Random House, 2000. Print.

Draper, James P. eds. Contemporary Literary Criticism. vol. 81. Yearbook. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1993. Print.

Gates, Jr., Henry Louis and Appiah K.A. eds. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Print.

Guthrie, Danille Taylor. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Print.

Holloway, Karla F.C. and Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie A. New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Print.

Mbalia, Doreatha Drummond. Toni Morrison’s Developing Class Consciousness. London: Senlinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1991. Print.

Mori, Aoi. Toni Morrison and Womanist Discourse. New York: Peterlang, 1999. Print.

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. Print.

- -. Sula. Vintage: Random House, 1989. Print.

- -. The Bluest Eye. New York: Pocket Books, 1972. Print.

Peterson, Nancy J. ed. Toni Morrison: Double Issue. West Lafayette: Perdue University, Fall/Winter, 1993. Print.

(http://www.jstor.org/stable/2904289?seq=2&Search=yes&searchText =epic&am,,, dt. 2/25/2014). Web.

127

CHAPTER - 5

A Critical Analysis of the Novels ‘Tar Baby’, ‘Beloved” and ‘Jazz’

Chapter V

A Critical Analysis of the Novels ‘Tar Baby’, ‘Beloved” and ‘Jazz’

This chapter is a continuation of the previous chapter. Here the following novels of Toni Morrison viz., Tar Baby, Beloved and Jazz will be studied in the light of the search for Black identity.

1. Tar Baby (1981)

The remarkable achievement of Song of Solomon (1977) was a turning point in Toni Morrison’s life and career which witnessed great professional and financial success. Though she retained her editing job at Random House, she devoted greater time on her writing. She now began to live in her new home at Grand view on – Hudson, in New York where she avoided the social scene and retreated into a private but literarily productive life:

She continued to write during the quiet and peaceful time, but now she woke at 5.00 a.m. rather than falling asleep during the one hours of the morning. Morrison would sit outside on her porch or on her private dock on the river to jot down story ideas, character and dialogues. (Rhodes 67)

This was how she began to write Tar Baby. (1981) The novel centers around the tumultuous relationship between two lovers from extremely different and conflicting economic and social backgrounds and its ultimate dissolution. Morrison draws on the African American folktale in the Uncle Remus Tales written by the white American writer Joe Chandler Harris. In this version, the white farmer, Brown makes a tar doll in order to trap a mischievous rabbit ‘Br’rer rabbit’ who ruins his cabbage garden. He dresses the tar baby in a skirt and bonnet and puts it in the garden. The rabbit mistakenly touches the sticky tar and gets entrapped. However he outwits the farmer by pretending to fear and makes his escape. Morrison tells Thomas Le Clair:

I use that old story because, despite its funny, happy ending, it used to frighten me. (Gates and Appiah 372)

128

However, as Dorothy H. Lee observes, “It seems a mistake to force the tale too closely on the novel, for the words ‘tar baby’ function primarily to suggest Black identity in a more general sense.” (Evans 355)

The novel elicited controversial critical reviews. While critics including John Irving pointed out Morrison’s overdose of dialogues and portrayal of fabulistic characters, others praised her for her beautiful language imagery and forceful message in the novel. Amidst the great critical debate, the book made it to the New York best seller list almost immediately after its publication. Morrison featured on the 30th March 1981 cover of the Newsweek magazine. It also became a great commercial success and was an important contribution to the growth of her literary career. In this novel, Morrison continues the pre-dominant concern of her earlier works – the search for identity. Here she focuses on the conflict between traditional black folk values and contemporary Euro-centric aspirations. However, this present novel marks a further step from the preceding works in the magnitude and complexity of Morrison’s treatment of this quest theme.

The story is set in the Carribean island of Isle de la chevaliers owned by a white millionaire, Valerian Street who is an inheritor of a candy company and even has a candy named after him. After his retirement from his confectionary business, Valerian comes to live in his island retreat, L’Arbe de la Crox accompanied by his young and beautiful wife, Margaret who was the former Miss Maine and his two faithful Black servant couple, Sydney and Ondine. Margaret and Valerian is not a happy couple because they have many differences but what they share in common is that they miss their son Michael together who never stays with them.

Valerian is a kind employer to Sydney and Ondine. He looks after them as well as their niece, Jadine. Valerian’s beautiful mansion has a green-house where he indulges himself in nurturing northern flowers by playing music to them. L’Arbe de la croix is apparently a paradise. However, we know that it is just an illusion. Beneath his benevolent exterior, Valerian is just another white exploiter. He builds his business by exploiting the Black people. He also controls Margaret’s life and never acknowledges her individual freedom. His racist principles destroy her only friendship with Ondine because “she should guide the servants, not consort with them.” (Morrison 59) He controls the natural plant and animal life for “adjusting the

129

terrain for comfortable living” (53) His cold detachment is seen in his isolated existence on the island. His only friend is Dr. Michelin, the French dentist.

The story begins when Jadine Childs, Sydney’s and Ondine’s niece comes over to L’Arbe de la Croix for a Christmas family reunion. The couple had settled to adopt her when Jadine was twelve years old and had lost both her parents. Being childless themselves, they shower their love on her and sought the best for her. They instill in her “the American dream of material safety, of personal dignity defined by a steady job.” (Carmean 69) Their dream materializes with Jadine’s accomplishment. She becomes a Sorbonne graduate with an advanced degree in Art History and successful Paris model who is being proposed marriage by “three gorgeous and raucous men.” (Morrison 48) Jadine is proud of her ‘white’ image:

Madamsiselle Childs … graduate of the Sorbonne … an accomplished student of art history … a degree in … is an expert on cloisonné, having visited and worked with the Master Nape … An American now living in Paris and Rome …. (116)

She behaves more like the white Streets’ daughter and less like the Black child. Ignoring her own racial heritage, she can never dismiss from her mind, the memory of the woman in yellow who appeared as a “vision.” She was so tall, “the skin like tar against the long canary dress.” Walking “as though her many-colored sandals were pressing gold tracks on the floor, her checks adorned by “two upside down V’s scored into each of her cheeks” and hair by “a gelee as yellow as her dress.” (Morrison 45) The woman carried herself, “left arm folded over her wait, right hand holding three white eggs in the air.” Jadine followed the woman as she stepped out of the store – “that woman’s ‘woman’ – that mother/sister/she; that unphotographable beauty.” And as she stood mesmerized, “to see something in her eyes so powerful, the woman turned, turned those eyes too beautiful for lashes and spat at her.” (48)

As the novel opens, Valerian and Margaret argue over the anticipated arrival of Michael to join them for Christmas which sends an angry Margaret into her room. But moments later, she runs back, screaming at having discovered a Black man hiding in her closet. To everybody’s shock and amazement, Valerian, instead of making his arrest, invites him to be his guest. The man introduces himself to be Son Green, an outlaw from Florida who jumped ship to escape jail. He has been hiding in

130

the house for several days and sneaking food. Jadine is terrified by Son’s wild appearance. Back in her room, as Jadine indulges in the seductive pleasure of the seal skin coat, a gift from her white European lover Ryk, she is stricken with fear to discover Son behind her.

Son mocks her identification with the Streets and her ‘white girl’ image and assaults her achievement by questioning her identity. Jadine feels a deep hatred and anger toward such an uncivilized man. After Son cuts away his awful hair and makes himself presentable, Jadine finds him irresistible. In spite of her efforts to restrain, his raw passions stirs her feminity. Soon, Son and Jadine become friendly enough to go on a picnic to the beach. Jadine wanders into the isolated woods of the island, known as Sein de Vieilles and falls into the tarblack slimy swamp.

After the disastrous Christmas dinner in the Streets’ home, Jadine and Son become lovers and escape to New York. There, Jadine experiences great happiness with Son. But Son does not feel so. Son sees in New York Black people “crying girls and the men on tippy toe.” (216) Home for Son was some place far away in Eloe which he began to long for. Finally, he succeeds in persuading Jadine to visit it. At Eloe, she feels to be “with a pack of Neanderthals who think sex is dirty or strange or something.” (257) The worst happens when she is haunted by the vision of the night women including her own mother, aunt Ondine, Son’s wife, Cheyenne, Rosa and a host of women she met in Eloe who crowd into her room and taunt her showing her their breasts while the woman in yellow, amongst them showed her three eggs.

They “were all out to get her, tie her, bend her. Grab the person she had worked so hard to become and checks it off with there soft loose tits.” (262) The couple returns to New York. But their cultural differences become so great that they finally split up. Jadine deserts Son and returns to L’Arbe de la Croix. Ondine attempts to initiate her into her familial responsibilities which Jadine ignores. At the end of the story, she takes a plane to Paris, to pursue her white dreams. Son pursues her to L’Arbe de la Croix. However, he is led by Therese, the blind old Black woman to the back shores of the island which is said to be haunted by the blind Black slave horsemen.

In the story, Jadine, the Black woman moulds herself into a typical Black bourgeoisie woman whose fundamental principle in life is industry as a key to

131

success and freedom. Her adoption of such a highly individualistic western white concept of life disconnects her from her Black people and culture. Her identification with the majority culture leads to a rejection of her Black identity. Falsely believing that success in the white world can assimilate her into it, her primary concern becomes the persuasion of a white definition of her ‘self’. The woman in yellow is a symbolical representation of Black womanhood and its maternal power which splendor and wholeness contrasts to the vacuity of the culturally alienated Black woman. She is a personification of the retributive cultural voice against Jadine’s shameful violation of her traditional and cultural role. But Jadine is too conceited and continues to lose herself in self betrayal. In his essay ‘Beyond Realism,’ Keith E.B. Yerman explains Jadine’s self denial:

She has ordered and defined her life by a firm control of sexual desire. She has equated sexuality with animality and desire with exploitation and has chosen to make herself into a gemstone rather than a woman. But Son disturbs the order. (Gates and Appiah 122)

Significantly, Morrison portrays Son as a natural man. This unity between man and nature has great relevance in an African perspective of life:

The spirit world is alive and gives life to the living. The essential ontology of African linking and curving through ancestor and offspring, man and nature, beast and trees, sea and fires … nothing is dead, no voice is still. (Holloway 118)

Son symbolizes the Black traditional and natural view of life. He threatens Jadine’s white image. Defying her culture, she rejects her feminity as vulnerability. Son’s sexuality awakens her repressed feminity. Unlike her, Son the natural man feels a passion for her. Gradually Jadine seems to rouse herself from her alienated existence as she responds to Son. As she falls into the tar black slimy swamp of Sein de Vieilles, she desperately clings to a tree to save herself from sinking deeper. While she struggles, the unseen female spirits hanging from the trees watch her:

They were delighted when first, they saw her thinking a runaway child has been restored to them. But on looking closer, they saw differently. This girl was trying to get away from them. The women hanging from the trees were quiet now, but arrogant and mindful as they were of their value, their

132

exceptional femaleness, knowing as they did, that the first world of the world had been built with their sacred properties. (183)

Here, Morrison highlights the rich cultural significance of tar. She tells Thomas Le Clair:

At one time, a tar pit was a holy place, at least an important place, because tar was used to build things. It came naturally out of the earth; it held together, things like Moses little boat and the pyramids. For me, the tar baby came to mean the black woman who can hold things together. (McKay 122)

But as she observes to Charles Ruas, Jadine’s tragedy is “that she wasn’t. She could not know, she could not hold anything to herself.”(111) The women hanging in the trees embody the voice of tradition and ancestors. Her escape from them and resistance of the tar signifies her estrangement of her ancestors. On the other hand, her symbolic immersion in the tar completes her image as the white man’s tarbaby ready to lure Son, the Black man. Jadine tempts him with the pleasures of ‘white’ city life but Son sees only the dehumanization of Black people. On the other hand, Jadine cannot tolerate the rural and traditional Black values represented by Son’s world of Eloe.

The night women represents once again, the spirit of Black womanhood, the images of breast and eggs signifying fertility and nurturance. They chastise Jadine for her denial of the nourishing heritage of her ancestral mothers. Jadine’s confrontation of them dramatize the conflict between tradition and its abandonment. Their haunting become symbolic of the painful haunting of the guilt and fear for Jadine’s abandonment of her feminine responsibilities. Each insists to save the other from what they perceive to be fatal. Jadine tries to strip Son off his folk ways. Son tries to rescue her from her selfish materialistic attitude to life but in vain:

Each was trying to pull the other away from the maw of hell – its very ridge top. Each now the world as it was meant or ought to be one had a past, the other a future and each one bore the culture to save the race in his hands. Mama spoiled black man, will you mature with me. Culture bearing black women, whose culture are you bearing. (269)

Their hostility culminates with Son’s sexual assault of Jadine and his taunting tale of story of the white man’s creation of the tarbaby to trap the rabbit:

133

And you what he did? He made him a tar baby. He made it. You hear me? He made it. (270)

The story obviously implies Son as the rabbit, Valerian as the white farmer and Jadine as his tarbaby trap to lure the Black man to his fall. Jadine is shattered. She condemns Son for his inability “to forget the past and do better” (271) and decides to leave him. Son is rooted to the past while Jadine strives to forget the past to make progress. The unsuccessfully split Jadine and Son warns against the loss, both for people to whom “the past is anathema” (Gates & Appiah 178) or those who ignore the present. Ondine attempts to initiate her into her familial responsibilities:

A girl has got to be a daughter first. She has to learn that. And if she never learns how to be a daughter, she can’t never learn to be a woman. I mean a real woman. A woman good enough for a child; good enough for a man… A daughter is a woman that cares about where she comes from and takes care of them that took care of her. (281)

While Jadine emerges as a self-centered character, Son also is not free from flaws. He is so vulnerable to her charms that he is willing to abandon his world and values. “Whereas Jadine rationalizes and fortifies in her selfishness, Son collapses and accepts Jadine’s imperceptive view of Eloe.” (294-295) Thus he sets out to pursue her after she deserts him and is ready to surrender himself to her. Here the story shows how the white majority values threaten Black identity and values. However, the power of his tradition rescues Son which symbolizes the redeeming power of Black cultural values.

On the other hand, does Jadine’s indictment point to the need for Black women to withhold their striving for freedom and concentrate more on their traditional responsibilities? Why does Jadine feel that Son is a man hard to forget?

134

(Morrison 292) It shows that the roots cannot be severed easily. The inconclusive ending underlines the confusing position of the Black man and woman stranded between their past and present.

The biblical epigraph at the beginning of the novel defines these conflicting contentions within Jadine. In contrast to these characters who are victimized by the conflict black and white values, Therese’s character boldly articulates an authentic Black voice. She is a blind and aged Black woman servant to Valerian. Once a wet nurse, her magical breasts still give sour milk. She is literally blind but is endowed with the power to see the past and the future. She is regarded as the descendent of the blind Black horsemen who inhabit the island and for whom the island is named. She knows Son’s presence before anyone does.

As the novel proceeds, her characters receive greater significance as Son’s mother figure. She provides him food during his days of hiding. Her obsession with apples stresses her nurturing aspect. She boldly denounces Jadine who has sacrificed her roots and origin. She warns Son and succeeds in rescuing him from the clutches of Jadine who have forsaken her “ancient properties” and would destroy him. If we compare Ondine and Therese regarding their maternal role, Ondine lacks the stature Therese commands because while she fails in mentoring Jadine, Therese’s becomes Son’s maternal mentor who saves him. Therese’s character thus represents an authentic Blackness- primal, pristine and nurturing.

2. Beloved (1987)

Morrison’s fifth novel is Beloved. (1987) Several years earlier at Random House in 1974, Morrison worked on a historical project called The Black Book to document the life, culture and experiences of the Black Americans spanning a historical period of over three hundred centuries. While collecting and editing articles for this project, she came across an article in a newspaper called American Baptist published in 1856. The article was entitled “A visit to the slave mother who killed her child”:

It said that the Abolitionists made a great deal out of her case because she had escaped from Kentucky, I think, with her four children. She lived in a little neighborhood justoutside the Cincinnati and she had killed her children. She

135

succeeded in killing one; she tried to kill two others. She hit them in the head with a shovel and they were wounded but didn’t die. And there was a smaller one that she had at her breast. The interesting thing, in addition to that, was the interviews that she gave. She was a young woman. In the inked pictures of her she seemed a very quiet, very serene – looking woman and everyone who interviewed her remarked about her serenity and tranquility. She said, “I will not let those children live how I have lived.” (Guthrie 207)

She had run off into a little woodshed right outside her house to kill them because she had been caught as a fugitive. And she had made up her mind that they would not suffer the way that she had and it was better for them to die. And her mother-in-law was in the house at the same time and she said, “I watched her and I neither encouraged her not discouraged her.” (207) They put her in jail for a little while and I’m not even sure what the denouement is of her story.

The article became the inspiration for Beloved. Morrison dedicates her book to “the sixty million” of the Blacks who died due to slavery. She expresses to Gloria Naylor, her difficulties in writing on a topic which was “National Amnesia” :(257)

I thought this has got to be the least read of all the books I’d written because it is about something that the characters don’t want to remember, I don’t want the remember, black people don’t want to remember, white people won’t want to remember. (Guthrie 257)

She further explains to Bonie Angelo:

I was trying to make it a personal experience. The book is not about the institution – Slavery with a capital S. It was about those anonymous people called slaves. What they do to keep on, how they make a life, what they’re willing to risk, however long it takes in order to relate to one another and that was incredible to me. (Guthrie 99)

Morrison felt an urgency to delve into the interior lives of the enslaved people in a way the nineteenth century slave narratives failed to do so and “lift that veil drawn over proceedings too terrible to relate.” (Gates and Appiah 2293)

From 1982 to 1986, she spent five years thinking about and writing the novel. She had few resources for her work. The slave narratives, accounts by the whites, folk songs and tales and even the museums gave little information about the reality of

136

slave life. She had to go to Brazil and visit its museums to see the devices of torture used on slaves which proved helpful in recreating the lives of slaves and the atrocities of slavery. Beloved is in fact only one third of a three volume work that Morrison initially planned to write but it is so complete in its penetrating study of Black slave experience that her editor Bob Gottlieb declared “it is a book” in itself.” (Guthrie 240)

The novel is set in Ohio in the post Emancipation period of 1873. The story centers around the life of an ex-slave woman, Sethe. Eighteen years earlier, she had fled from a Kentucky slave plantation along with her children and came to settle in the house of Baby Suggs, her mother-in-law. Halle, her husband never made it to freedom. Sethe killed her baby girl to prevent her from being taken to slavery. The house is haunted by the ghost of the murdered child. Sethe’s act and the spooky house ex-communicates her family from the community. Her sons run away in fear of Sethe and the ghost. After Baby Sugg’s death, Sethe and her youngest daughter, Denver remains in the house tormented by the angry ghost.

Sethe’s traumatic past tortures her. We learn she tries to forget it in order to continue her life. The arrival of Paul D. however, revives it as she begins to share the memories of her past with him. Paul immediately discovers the ghost and drives it` out of the house. Denver is hostile to Paul D. because of the attention Sethe gives him and because he has driven away the ghost who was her only other company.

Paul D. is determined to offer his love and support to remove the misery in Sethe’s life. The happy visit to the local carnival brings hope for a happy family for Sethe, Paul D. and Denver. But it was not to be. On their way back, they meet a strange girl sitting on a stump by the bridge, “sopping wet and breathing shallow,” and with “new skin, lineless and smooth.” (Morrison 60-62)They take the mysterious girl home with them. She is about twenty years of age and appears to be both a child and a woman. She does not explain anything about herself but calls herself Beloved. The similarity of her name with that of her dead child moves Sethe with tenderness. She takes her in because she wants to help a poor lost and sick and Denver needs a friend. Beloved soon shows a strong attachment to Sethe and surprises Sethe with questions about her past which she is persuaded to talk about now. The numerous flashbacks of Sethe and Paul D help us to reconstruct the lives of Sethe, Paul D, Denver and Beloved.

137

Sethe was the daughter of a slave woman. Because her mother was not allowed to feed or care for her, she was brought up by another woman, Nan. The only thing she could remember about her mother was the branding mark on her body. Thirteen year old Sethe becomes a slave on the Kentucky plantation, Sweet Home where Paul D. and his brothers and Halle and Sixo worked. Their owner, Mr. Garner was a kind slave-master who respected his slaves as ‘men’ and even let them have guns. He allows Halle to buy the freedom of his mother. All the male slaves except Sixo who had his thirty mile woman, yearned for Sethe. Sethe becomes Halle’s wife and the mother of two sons, Howard and Burgler and a baby girl.

Sweet Home where Sethe achieves the bliss of a home which offered marriage and motherhood gave her an illusion that “it really was one.” (28) However her good days end with the death of Mr. Garner and the arrival of school teacher and his nephews. “School teacher broke into children what Garner had raised into men.” (260) He questions and records their answers. His view that “definitions belonged not to the defined but the definers” (225) tears Sixo up who stopped speaking English, the language of the oppressors “because there was no future in it.” (30) He beats the slaves, measures their bodies and instructs his nephews to list down their animal characteristics.

As life becomes unbearable, Sethe, Halle and the others decide to escape. However the plan fails. Sixo is burnt and shot. Paul A. is hanged. Paul D. is chained and collared. Sethe delivers her children to the women on the wagon and returns back to look for Halle. But she is caught and molested by the nephews. She recalls bitterly “those boys came and took my milk. That’s what they came in there for. Held me down and took it.” (19) She tells about it to Mrs. Garner who “couldn’t do anything but cry.” (238) When schoolteacher comes to know about it, her back is whipped severely. Sehe is determined to flee in order to reach her baby. Young, pregnant and alone, notwithstanding a torn back and swollen feet, the horrific sight of dismembered bodies hanging from the trees, the darkness or anything or even God, she pursues her way to freedom and her children. At last, the extreme exhaustion, her swollen and bloody feet and the wildly moving baby within her makes it impossible for her to proceed any further. At that moment, she discovers the ragged white girl, Amy Denver. Amy is an indentured servant, herself a run-away on her way to Boston, seeking velvet. The kind-hearted white girl takes pity on her and helps her

138

out. She tends her swollen feet and torn back, describing it as “a chokecherry tree.” (93)

Amy helps Sethe to deliver her baby on the banks of the Ohio and gives it her own name ‘Denver’ before leaving Sethe and resuming her journey to Boston. Once again, Sethe is left on her own with a new-born baby. Sethe finally reaches 124, Bluestone Baby Suggs’ home. Baby Suggs is an ex-slave woman who had eight children from six fathers, all sold away except Halle who remained with her, Garner bought her son Halle along with her. At Sweet Home, she saw better days. Halle lent himself out to buy freedom for his mother.

Suggs who was no longer bothered about freedom, loved it after its experience. She discovered a self which she had never known it existed. After she settles at 124, she sets up the way station at 124 and becomes an unchurched preacher who preaches to other people like herself to love themselves.

Suggs is delighted to receive the family of her beloved child, Halle. She nurses a battered Sethe back to health. Sethe experiences great joy in freedom and uniting with her children. Suggs celebrates the happy occasion by hosting a sumptuous feast. The next day, Schoolteacher arrives at 124 along with his nephew, a slave-catcher and the sheriff to retrieve Sethe and her children. Sethe now finds only a way to save her children from suffering at the hands of the oppressors. She rushes to the woodshed, taking her children where she attempts to kill them herself to escape their recapture. However she succeeds in killing only the two-year old by slitting her throat with a hand-saw. The Schoolteacher leaves her because she is no longer useful as she has gone wild. Sethe lovingly engraves her baby’s name as Beloved even if she has to pay the engraver with ten minutes of sex to do the job “for free.” (5) She is jailed and released after some months. Suggs loses her faith in her conviction to love life and retreats in her bed, yearning for color. Sethe alienates herself from the community which she feels does not support her.

The community scorns her for her murder of her own child. She gets herself a job and manages all alone a home with a senile mother-in-law and three children who were always frightened. Denver quits school because her classmates humiliates her. Soon the spirit of the dead baby returns and wrecks havoc upon the house. For the next eighteen years, Sethe “worked hard to remember as close to nothing, as was

139

safe.” (6) The arrival of Paul D and Beloved has awakened her past which now unsettles her present. Paul D’s revelation about Helle’s insanity after witnessing the white boys molesting her further grieves her. Seeking peace, Sethe comes to the clearing and she sits on Suggs’ preaching rock, she could feel Suggs’ caressing fingers on her neck. Suddenly the fingers begin to strangle her until Beloved and Denver come to her rescue. Strangely, Sethe becomes suspicious that it was Beloved herself who attempted to strangle her. Sethe finally decides to build her life with Paul and share together a future as they share a common past. (117)

Just as Sethe copes with her past by stifling it, Paul D. devises his own way to endure it. After he is captured by schoolteacher, he is forced to wear a ‘bit’ in his mouth, shackled and collared which reduces him to something even lesser than a rooster. He is sold away. After attempting to kill his new master Brandywine, he is sent to Georgia where he is caged and chained along with other Black slave convicts in a trench. He is subjected to extreme dehumanization.

However his meeting with Sethe brings hope for a new life but which Beloved’s presence disrupts. Soon Beloved seduces him and finds himself surrendering against his own will, to her. To his surprise, making love to Beloved, splits open his tobacco tin and releases his “red heart, red heart.” (138) Paul decides to reveal his act to Sethe but ends up instead, asking her to have his child. Sethe and Paul D enjoy the bliss of their togetherness. Beloved feels miserable about it and persuades Sethe to drive Paul D away. She astonishes Denver by pulling out a tooth. She now fears that she will fall apart without Sethe.

The inevitable happens. Stamp Paid shows the newspaper clipping featuring Sethe’s murder of her child. Paul D is shocked when Sethe confirms its truth. She declares her powerful and strong love which led to the act. But Paul D who has learnt to love “just a little bit” (54) accuses her of her “too thick” love . (193) Sethe who sees no other way of saving her children affirms her success in saving them from misery. But Paul D sees it as a violation of her humanity. “You got two legs, not four.” (194) Unable to reconcile himself with Sethe’s terrible truth, he leaves 124.

Sethe realizes her foolishness in trusting Paul D But she is now fully determined to continue her life with Denver and Beloved. She finally discovers that Beloved is her own dead baby who has returned to her because of her strong love. It

140

justifies her act and promises her freedom from the shackles of past guilt. Her joy is boundless when she feels that “she no longer has to remember” and can follow Suggs’ advice “to lay it down for good.” (215-16) Stamp Paid regrets for having destroyed Sethe’s and Paul’s joy but Sethe doesn’t care for the world outside. She immerses herself in a world with her two children inside 124. “The world is in this room. There is and all there needs to be.” (215) They were at last “free to be what they liked, see whatever they saw and say whatever was on their minds.” (235) Suddenly “124 was loud” as voices that Stamp Paid recognizes to be those of the “people of the broken necks, of fire-cooked blood and black girls who had lost their ribbons” (199) merged with the thoughts of these women. (213) These thoughts were “unspeakable thoughts, unspoken.” (235)

The interior monologues of Sethe, Denver and Beloved reveal the inner conflicts in their minds. Sethe tries to justify her murder of Beloved as an act of love and expresses the fear and loss of her own mother. Denver expresses her fear of her killer mother and her longing to her own father. Beloved’s apparently incoherent utterances consisting of unpunctuated lines, separated by wide word spaces describe the horrific experiences of an young African female on a slave ship during the ‘middle passage’ at the hands of “the men without skin,” meaning the white men. The voices finally merge into one hungry claim for possession uniting Africa and America, the past and the present and mothers and daughters. Sethe, Denver and Beloved experience great joy in their togetherness. They indulge in fancy food, clothes and games so that they look like “three carnival women with nothing to do.” (288-89)

Soon Sethe and Beloved develop an obsession for each other which excludes even Denver. Sethe loses her job and spends her life’s savings to fulfill Beloved’s material demands. Sethe must now become the mother she wanted to be. She longs to compensate for causing Beloved pain by loving and pleasing her in every way. But Beloved is always accusing and demanding. “All the time, she was trying to make up for the hand- saw. She was making her pay for it. (293) However Sethe can never ever satisfy Beloved who becomes extremely violent in her insatiable demands. Her endless demands consume Sethe physically and emotionally. Beloved becomes pregnant. “The bigger Beloved got, the smaller Sethe becomes” (290) for “Beloved

141

ate up her life, took it, swelled up with it, grew taller on it. And the older woman yielded it up without a murmur.” (291)

Soon, they were starving. Denver can no longer bear Beloved’s deadly grip on her mother which was destroying their whole world. No longer shy or timid, she sets out of 124 to seek the community’s help. The kindly Lady Jones offers her food and help which is followed by more support from the other women in the community. Denver gets a job at the Bodwins’, the white abolitionist family. Ella and the other community women who have all along hated Sethe for forsaking them now forgives her and decides to save her from the clutches of the devil woman.

As the women gather in Sethe’s yard and begin to pray aloud, they see Beloved and Sethe standing at the door. At that moment, Mr Bodwins arrives at 124 to give Denver a lift on his way home. Sethe sees a re-enactment of the day when the white men came to take her and her children away. But now instead of killing her child, she rushes towards the white man, ice-pick in hand, ready to kill him. Denver and the women over-power her. As Beloved sees Sethe run towards the pile of people, leaving her again she explodes and vanishes. Thus Beloved is exorcised out of 124. But her inimical presence has greatly ravaged Sethe’s mind and body, spiritually and physically. Sethe goes to lie on Baby Suggs’ bed and like her, begins to ponder on color. Denver who has now matured into a responsible, strong woman and understood the lives of her mother and others like her welcomes Paul D back into their lives. Paul D finds Sethe miserable after her loss of Beloved. Paul D who has finally recovered his human heart and resolves to love himself and teaches others to do the same, inspires her to rise up from her misery and move into the future.

Beloved dwells on the impact of slavery on the lives of the Blacks. Slavery remains the greatest testimony of human cruelty and savagery that the world had ever seen. The dehumanization and degradation of Black people under such a system was of such proportions that it resulted in a complete loss of their selfhood and identity. The psychic consequences of such loss of selfhood is that even after they achieve freedom, they are entrapped in an inner enslavement of the self which render them incapable of living emotionally healthy lives.

Sethe’s life illustrates the grim suffering of a Black slave woman. Her sad story begins in her childhood when she experiences the painful deprivation of

142

maternal nurturing and even milk and the death of her mother who herself was only a branded commodity. Her ignorance of her mother’s African language highlights her cultural estrangement. At Sweet Home, becoming a wife and the mother of her three children nurtures Sethe’s sense of her identity as a mother but life turns out to be a cruel joke. The white boys milk her like a cow and tear her back.

For Sethe, it was the greatest violation of her womanhood and motherhood. But she is determined not to let the white oppressors separate her from her children or deprive them of her milk as in the past. Once she reaches Cincinnati, Baby Suggs’ love and the communal connection heals Sethe’s fragmented self and she learns to possess her free and whole self because “Freeing your self was one thing. Claiming ownership of that freed self is another.” (112) Her happiness is boundless in knowing that she is no longer a property but an individual, not a breeder of slaves but a real mother. Thus against all odds and forces around her which deny it, she defines herself as a mother. She says to Paul:

I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide. Look like I loved em more after I got here. (190)

When schoolteacher tries to recapture her and her children, she resolves never to allow her children to be sent into that oppressive world, even if it means death for them. She finally has no choice but to kill her baby in order to save her from the clutches of the white oppressors. Sethe’s tragedy illustrates the factors which prevent her from becoming a mother. Morrison says that Sethe “just became a mother, which is becoming a human being in a situation which is earnestly dependent on your not being one. That’s who she is” and she defends it so fiercely: (Guthrie 252)

She almost steps over into what she was terrified of being regarded as, which is an animal. It is an excess of maternal feeling, a total surrender to that commitment, and, you know, such excesses are not good. She has stepped across the line, so to speak. It’s understandable, but it is excessive. This is what the townspeople of Cincinnati respond to, not her grief, but her arrogance. (252)

However Sethe’s tragedy points to a brutal truth of slavery which compels a mother to kill her child. Throughout her later life she has to repress her horrific past

143

in order to survive. Sethe pre-occupied herself with “the day’s serious work of beating back the past.” (Morrison 86) For Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. (57) But it keeps haunting her present. The spirit of the past manifests in flesh and blood as Beloved. Beloved becomes the embodiment of past guilt which traumatizes Sethe’s present. The caressing fingers on Sethe’s neck which turns into choking ones become what Patrick Byrce Bjork in his essay “Beloved: Paradox of Past and Present, Self and Other” observes “the fluctuating quality and unresolvable paradox of memory.” (156) That memory is both a “blessing” and a “haunting.” (96)

The character of Paul D tells another sad tale of the destruction of the Black man’s selfhood. His unsuccessful flight attempt subjects him to the most degrading and humiliating punishment breaking him down to something even lesser than a rooster:

Mister. But wasn’t no way I’d ever be Paul D again, living or dead. Schoolteacher changed me. I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun or a tub. (Morrison 86)

His horrific imprisonment among the Georgia chain convicts in a cage in the ground, “in a grave calling itself quarters” completes the process of dehumanization. (125) It crushes his selfhood. According to Karen Carmean, “His human heart dies” and becomes a tobacco tin where he buries his brutal past and shuts tight. (92)

Denver also experiences great alienation as a legacy of slave past. She carries the burden of shame and isolation from social ostracization. She quits school and withdraws into a self created world in the bower of boxwood trees. There, far away, “closed off from the hurt of the hurt world,” she experiences the joy of her own free and living self. (35) The story of her birth thrills her because it was an affirmation of her existence. She hates Paul D because he intrudes on the intimate bond with her mother and drives away the ghost, her only other company. Beloved’s company delights her lonely soul and is overjoyed when she discovers that Beloved is her dead sister returned because she will never be lonely again.

Thus, Morrison portrays in the novel, characters whose past continue to keep them frozen in an inner guilt and pain that prevent them from living life fully. What Morrison insists is that confrontation of the unspeakable anguish and past is the basis

144

for change and healing. For Sethe to heal, she has to be able to confront the past, live through it and move beyond. The community helps Sethe to exorcise, Beloved out of her life. The recovery of the self is possible only through collective help and sharing. Morrison expresses her view to Marsha Darling:

They don’t want to talk, they don’t want to remember, they don’t want to say it, because they are afraid of it – which is human. But when they do say it, and hear it, and look at it, and share it, they are not only one, they’re two, and three, and four, you know? The collective sharing of that information heals the individual and the collective. (Guthrie 248)

Paul D returns to Sethe after he has achieved his real freedom. His confrontation with Beloved has released his human heart. He has salvaged his self which was destroyed by slavery. He can now face his inner pain and understand Sethe’s act. According to Karen Carmean, Paul D has come to realize:

That the most sinister affect of slavery was the injection of self-contempt which had to be countered by an insistent recognition of self-worth. (93)

Thus he is able to gather the piece of Sethe’s fragmented self and hold it back to her saying “that you, yourself are the best.” His words urges her to recover her selfhood and a new future. This was the lesson taught by Baby Suggs. Baby Suggs life had seen an unspeakable past. She lived in a world “where men and women were moved like checkers.” (27) Slavery has broken her ‘selfhood’. She expresses the pain of not knowing herself, “for the sadness was at her center, the desolated center where the self that was no self made its home. Sad as it was that she did not know where her children were buried or what they looked like if alive, fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like.” (165)

Halle buys her freedom “when it didn’t mean a thing.” (20) But later on, she realizes that “there is nothing like it in the world” : (166)

Because slave life had busted her legs back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue, she had nothing left to making a living with but her heart which she put to work at once. (102)

145

Thus she becomes an unchurched preacher for her people who exhorts to them to love their bodies and above all, love their heart “because this was the prize.” (104) Sadly “her faith, her love, her imagination and her great old heart began to collapse” after Sethe’s act which was a violation of her own flesh and blood. (89) However, the significance of Suggs’ faith lies in her celebration of the Black self which brings true emancipation to the characters in the novel. The character of Denver illustrates another such achievement of wholeness. When she realizes that Beloved has become a malevolent force bent on destroying her mother, the initially withdrawn Denver rises to save her mother. She “steps off the edge of the world and seeks the community for help.” (286) The love and tenderness she receives nurtures her lonely and deprived soul. “It was the word “baby,” said softly and with such kindness which inaugurated her life as a woman” (292) She discovers her self and begins to love it:

Somebody had to be saved but unless Den got work, there would be no one to save, no one to come home to, and no Denver either. It was a new thought, having a self to look out for and preserve. (297)

According to Susan Bowers, Denver, “Born in a boat filling with “the river of freedom,” she represents the generation born outside slavery – the future.” (Giroux 281) In her, Morrison envisions the hope for the new generation of post slavery Black for a future through collective connection and consciousness.

The life of Stamp Paid, exemplifies a stoic preservation of the self against the brutality of white oppression. Initially called Joshua, he suffers the ignominy of offering his wife Vashti to the young master which secures his freedom. When she is returned back, he has to resist killing her by changing his name instead to Stamp Paid. It is a way to remind himself by sacrificing his manhood and his wife that “whatever his obligations were, that act paid them off.” (Gates and Appiah 333) As Trudier Harris observes, “Stamp Paid is certainly owned during slavery but he is not possessed. (330)

In Beloved, Morrison has succeeded in bringing out a penetrating study of the psychological impact of slavery on the Blacks which results in a complete fragmentation of their lives and self-worth. The novel centers on the fundamental question of regaining their lost humanity and identity. Morrison explores the need for Blacks of a confrontation of their past, and the ability to transfer their pain and terror

146

into knowledge to empower them in reclaiming themselves:

An no one speaks, no one tells the story about himself or herself unless forced. They don’t want to talk, they don’t want to remember, they don’t want to say it, because they’re afraid of it which is human. But when they say it, and hear it, and, look at it, and share, and four you know? The collective sharing of that information heals the individual and the collective. (Guthrie 248)

At the end of the novel, we see a repetition of lines, “It was not a story to pass on,” “It was not a story to pass on” and “This is not a story to pass on.” (323- 24) It implies that it is not a story to be taken lightly. It is also a story which is too terrible to relate. The shift from “it” to “This” at the beginning of the lines insists greater emphasis on the undeniable continuity of the pain.(Peterson 722- 23) In spite of the community’s claim about forgetting her, Beloved becomes an ever-present factor in its life, like “just weather. Certainly no clamour for a kiss.” (324)

Beloved then stands for those millions who perished unknown and unmourned in slavery. The story which ends with her name ‘Beloved’ becomes a testimony of those ancestors whose presence continues to endure in the life of its progeny. The progeny must remember and love them to ensure its own continuity and future. They must remember and pass on their stories, to seek not pain but an affirmation of their strength and triumph which will light their way to a new world and an identity that is Black and human.

3. Jazz (1992)

Some time before she began writing Beloved, Morrison came across a book of photographs called The Harlem Book of the Dead published by Camille Billops and collected by Van Der Jee in the 1020s featuring the pictures of late Black residents of New York of the period. Morrison’s attention was drawn to a particular photograph of a young girl lying in a coffin. She read Van Der Jee’s commentary about her:

She was the one I think was shot by her sweetheart at a party with a gun. She complained to being sick at the party and friends said, ‘Well, why don’t you lay down?’ And they took her in the room and laid her down. After they undressed her and loosened her clothes, they saw the blood on her dress. They

147

asked her about it and she said, ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow, yes. I’ll tell you tomorrow.’ She was just trying to give him a chance to get away. (Morrison x)

Morrison wrote in the foreward of the novel that she was struck by the girl’s decision to die and help the lover get away which seemed so young, so foolish, so wrapped up and entangled in the sacrifice that tragically romantic love demanded: (x)

The anecdote seemed to me redolent of the proud hopelessness of love mourned and championed in blues music. It asserted itself immediately and aggressively as the seed of a plot, a story line.(x)

It inspired her pre-occupation with a trilogy around her favourite theme of love. She proposed Beloved as the first, Jazz, the second and Paradise, the third of the said trilogy. In her own words, “following Beloved’s focus of mother-love, I intended to examine couple love – the reconfiguration of the “self” in such relationships.” (Morrison xii) The novel tells the tragic love triangle of a southern Black couple and a young girl set against the tumultuous backdrop of the Harlem of the Jazz age of the 1920s.

Joe Trace, born in Vesper Country, Virginia in 1870 is an orphan. He lives with a kindly couple Rhoda and Frank Williams and their own children. Discovering from them that his unknown parents left without a “trace,” Joe assumes himself to be the trace they left behind and names himself so. During a hunt, Hunters Hunter, his mentor warns him against hurting or killing a certain crazy woman called Wild, who lives in a cave with a flock of blue-black birds with red wings because “she is somebody’s mother and somebody ought to take care.” (175) Henry’s words somehow lead Joe to assume that she must be his own mother. He decides to hunt for her. Once while pursuing her in the rocks and bushes, he heard “the music the world makes,” and found that “the scrap of song came from a woman’s throat.” (177) But he could not see her. After the racist attack of Virginia when “nine hundred negroes encouraged by guns and hemp left Vienna and rode out of towns or wagons or walked on the feet to who knew or cared where,” (173-4) he searches for her again.

He feels her presence behind the bushes and pleads her to say anything or show her hand as a sign to show that she was his mother but in vain. Her silence makes him so angry that he shoots his empty gun at an oak tree. Driven homeless

148

and jobless by the racist burning of cane fields, Joe leaves Virginia for Bear, then Crossland, Goshen and Palestine where he meets Violet. Violet also belongs to a poor southern Black sharecropper’s family. After her father goes away on his mysterious business, the family is dispossessed of land and property by the white debt collectors. They tip even the chair in which her mother Rose Dear sat, throwing her on the ground and taking it away. Rose becomes depressed with grief and shock. Violet’s grandmother True Belle, an ex-slave arrives from Baltimore to take care of the family. True Belle accompanied her to Baltimore when the latter was banished from Vesper country by her parents for conceiving the child of her Black slave lover. Rose commits suicide by jumping into a well just two weeks before her husband returns with “ingots of gold,” “two-dollar pieces” and ‘snake oil.”(99)

Violet recalls how True Belle filled her with stories about a lovely golden haired white boy “which I never ever saw but who tore up her girlhood as surely as if we’d been the best of lovers.” (97) Violet goes to Palestine work as a cotton picker. She sleeps one night under a walnut tree when Joe who has been sleeping in the branches above falls down beside her. Both orphans, poor and lonely, they instantly fall in love with each other and soon gets married. Life becomes hard for the young couple when they are cruelly evicted from their land. They decide to go to the north where “colored men and women laughing all night and making money all day.” (108) As the narrator describes, “The wave of black people running from want and violence crested in the 1870s, the ‘80s, the ‘90s but was a steady stream in 1906 when Joe and Violet joined them.” (33) Joe and Violet board the colored section of the Southern Sky with joy and anticipation:

Entering the lip of the city dancing all the way. Her hip bones rubbed his thigh as they stood in the aisle unable to stop smiling. They weren’t even there yet and already the City was speaking to them. They were dancing. And like a million others, chests pounding, tracks controlling their feet, they stared out the windows for first sight of the City that danced with them, proving already how much it loved them. Like a million more they could hardly wait to get there and love it back. (32)

Once they reach the city, there was no turning back because it was not perfect. “It was better than that.” (107) It enchanted them:

149

Do what you please in the city, it is there to back and frame you. All you have to do is head for the design – the way it is laid out for you, considerate, mindful of where you want to go and what you might need tomorrow. (8)

Joe and Violet struggle hard to make it in the city. They decide not to have children. They finally move to Lenox Avenue, Harlem. Joe works in a restaurant besides becoming a door-to-door salesman selling cosmetic products. Violet becomes an unlicensed but good hairdresser who visits the homes of her clients. After twenty years Joe and Violet are in their fifties and still together but their lives have changed. Childlessness and the lonely city life wear her down.

The depression results in a severe psychological and emotional rupture. It makes her sit down in the middle of a street or attempt to steal a baby. At home she barely speaks to Joe. She sleeps with a doll and talks only to her birds, a parrot among them which says ‘I love you’. (24) Joe feels miserable. Violet’s love has rescued him from rejection and isolation. But suddenly she no longer cares for him or speaks to him. Eventually, Violet’s silence and indifference drains out his passion for her. Searching once again for love, he falls for eighteen year old Dorcas. Dorcas, the only child of her parents who live in East St. Louis, becomes an orphan at an early age. Her father is “stomped to death” (57) during the race riots of the Bloody Summer of 1917. Five days later, while Dorcas sleeps with a friend across the street, her home is burnt down with her mother and her favorite dolls inside it.

As little Dorcas watches the explosion of her home, she experiences the flames entering and settling inside her. After the death of her parents, Dorcas is adopted by her aunt Alice Manfred, a seamstress who lives in Harlem. Alice feels the city was dangerous for young black girl like Dorcas. So “she instructed her about deafness and blindness” among white people and doing anything “to avoid a white boy over the age of eleven.” (Morrison 54-5) She forbids Dorcas all the provocative fashionwear and appearances of the city and prescribes restraint, modesty and plainness for her safety. But worst of all was the music. “The dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played and both danced close and shameless on apart and wild” which “made you do unwise, disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law.” (Morrison 58)

However what baffles Alice about “this juke joint, barrel hook, tonk house, music is “its appetite,” a “careless hunger” which belies “a complicated anger” (59)

150

similarly emanating from the Fifth Avenue Protest March drums. While Alice secretly struggles to protect herself from it, Dorcas is seduced by the angry “low- down music” which says “Come and do wrong. ” (56-67) Despite her aunt’s efforts, “nothing hid the boldness under the cast iron skirt” (61) she sneaks out with her friend Felice to a party. Frustrated with rejection by her peers and her stifling world, “life was unbearable” until the day Joe comes to Alice’s apartment to make a cosmetic delivery. (63) She falls passionately in love with him. Joe pays Malvonne, his upstairs neighbor to lend her as their secret love nest. Dorcas brings youth, freshness and love to Joe’s life just as he satisfies her youthful passions.

After a long quest, Joe finds his liberated self which can choose to love Dorcas “who knew better than people his own age what that inside nothing was like. And who filled it for him, just as he filled it for her because she had it too.” (38) But Dorcas’ wild cravings soon make her long for a more thrilling kind of love which Joe cannot provide her. She becomes bored with Joe and leaves him for Acton, a lover of her own age.

A desperate Joe spends five days looking for her all over the city until he tracks her down at a party dancing in the arms of Acton. Before he can realize, he shoots her with a silent gun and she dies. Joe escapes the law in the absence of proper evidence and because Alice saw that “nothing improve anything.” (4) In a fit of jealousy, Violet rushes to the funeral and tries to slash the face of Dorcas’ corpse. After she is driven away, she rushes to the apartment where she frees all her birds, including the parrot. Unable to fly away in the freezing chill, it remains on the window sill, uttering “I love you” until it topples off and dies.

Joe and Violet are left to live in misery and bitterness. Violet decides to punish Joe for his infidelity by taking in a lover but he does not care and remains crying all the time in his darkened room. Violet decides to find out everything about Dorcas who stole her husband. She goes to Malvonne, Dorcas’ teachers and finally her aunt Alice. Alice tries to drive her away but Violet persists enough until Alice reveals everything about Dorcas and even gives her the dead girl’s picture to get rid of her. Every night Violet and Joe take turns to look at Dorcas’ picture on the mantel and speak out their thoughts. While Joe drowns himself in mourning, Violet’s regular visits to Alice changes her life. Alice begins to understand Violet’s jealousy because once, she had also felt it herself.

151

When her husband left her for another woman, “may be she would have done something wild.” (86) Violet also learns about Dorcas who could have been her missing daughter. Sharing much in common, Violet and Alice develop a friendship where they could be “impolite, sudden and frugal” with each other and become” so easy with each other talk wasn’t always necessary.” (83-112) Alice’s friendship heals her inner fragmentation into a wholeness, a “me” (210) that achieves self knowledge. She realizes that their oppressive past, which drove Joe crazy for a wild mother love just as she was, by her golden haired, white dream boy, prevents them from really loving each other. Violet’s new self enlightens Dorcas’ friend Felice. Felice comes back to retrieve her ring which she gave to Dorcas to wear for the party. The ring was a gift from her mother whom Felice knew, had stolen it from a jewellery store out of spite for the white salesman. Felice felt ashamed about it. Violet’s revelation about the need to possess a real self who is strong enough to confront and rise from its own guilt and misery inspires Felice to understand her own life and her parents better:

So I know how much taking the ring meant to her. How proud she was of breaking her rules for once. But I’ll tell her I know about it, and that it’s what she did, not the ring, that I really love. (215)

She tells Joe to stop grieving because Dorcas bled to death by refusing to go to hospital. But she also tells him how she loved him till her death and forgave him which enables Joe to come to terms with his life. Felice’s arrival brings joy to the Traces’ home. By the time she leaves, Joe and Violet are able to rise from their misery to make a new life together again.

The novel focuses on a certain period in American history when Blacks driven by “Want and Violence” migrated from the south to the industrial cities of the north. (33) Southern Blacks flocked the northern cities of Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago and New York. As Robert A. Bone observes, “the urban setting lifted the negro into a new plane of consciousness,” bringing about a re-awakening of the ‘New Negro’ in a new world. (336) Harlem in New York, became in James Weldon Jackson words, “The Negro capital of the World.” (Gates and McKay 955) The spirit of exuberance and liberty that permeated all walks of Black life of the period consummating in the great cultural and artistic ferment of the Harlem

152

Renaissance finds its fullest expression in its music, jazz. But beneath the note of optimism, lurked the bleak realities of racism, poverty, the perils of their new life and freedom, anger, violence, sexual license and dislocation of values and identity. Jazz music celebrates the lives of its people, their joys, passions, longings, dreams, anger and anguish. To quote Morrison herself:

A modernity which overturns pre-war definitions ushers in the jazz age (an age defined by Afro American art and culture) and requires new kinds of intelligences to define oneself Efforts to shape identity become newly, “complex contradictory, evasive, independent an liquid.” (Draper 250)

Jazz dramatizes the struggle of these people caught in the throes of a conflict between hope and despair, dream and reality, freedom and suppression and their quest, for wholeness as they cope with the contradictions of a new urban experience. Speaking to Eliza Scaphell, Morrison discusses the impact of freedom on post reconstruction Blacks:

What that must have meant for people whose bodies have been owned, who had been slaves, who had been slaves children or who remembered their parents as slaves. (269)

It drove them wild and hungry. Morrison studies how such hunger destroys love and relationships, which stand testimony to the sad sabotage of humanity by the culture of enslavement and racism. Looking from this view point, Jazz is a continuation of Morrison’s pre-occupation with the theme of love or its absence. (Guthrie 40) Terry Otten in his essay ‘Horrific love in Morrison’s Fiction’ comments:

The horrific love in Morrison’s novels is multifaceted, psychological, social and historical. It is for the most part in the manifestation of a culture corrupted in its racial past and in its present. It is the creation of forces so brutal that they can transform conventional “signifiers” of cruelty and evil into gestures of extraordinary love – incestuous rape, infanticide and murder articulate not the immorality condemned by the dominant culture but the inverse. They become acts “signifying” a profound if often convoluted love. (Peterson 652)

Violet and Joe’s country love withers in the city. “Like the others, they were country people, but how soon country people forget” because “they soon forget

153

what loving other people was like.” (33) But a closer look reveals factors which wrecks and disturbs their present. Violet’s agonizing childhood where her mother committed suicide and abandoned, her fixes her decision “never never to have children.” (102)

Over time, maternal longings sets into a deep depression. “She stumbles into these cracks,” “dark fissures in the globe light of the day” (22-3) and denies Joe love. We discover that her fascination, after True Belle’s stories with Golden Gray, has secretly perverted her love for Joe. She remains silent. Later in the novel, spurred by jealousy and anger, such wildness culminates in her frantic attempt to cut the face of Dorcas’ corpse.

Seduced by the dreams of the city, Joe chooses the freedom of wild young loving. His brutal past “makes him seek Dorcas as his incarnation as “New Negro in search of freedom.” (661) It also reflects his desperate quest for love. The unfulfilled pursuit of his mother leaves him with a wild hunger. Violet’s love removed his loneliness but her silence renews his wild fears and longings. In fact “Wild was always on his mind.” (176) According to Terry Otten, “These traces of his mother, haunt him for the rest of his life causing him to act wild at times.” (Peterson 626)

Thus he falls for young Dorcas who gives him the love, so long deprived Joe completely identifies Dorcas with Wild. When Dorcas deserts him, Joe’s fear of losing her love drives him into a wild jealousy which knows no other way to possess except by destroying. “I had the gun but it was not the gun it was my hand I wanted to touch you with.” (131)

Dorcas is another victim of deprivation. Quite early in life, she experiences the monstrosity of a world that destroyed her home and happiness. It nurtures in her, an anguish and anger which defies all restraint and finally bursts forth into a wild rebelliousness:

To do something scary all the time. Steal things, or go back in the store and slap the face of a white sales girl who wouldn’t wait on hair or cuss out somebody who had snubbed her. (202)

Thus she takes a middle-aged man as her love and desert him at will and even chose to do die. Swept by the lies of the city, “Everything was a picture show to her.”

154

(203) Dorcas lives out a wildness born of a angry past and nurtured by a city of “stronger, riskier selves” which says “come and do wrong.” (33-67)

Even Alice Manfred, the only character who represents control and restraint in the novel exhibit some streak of wildness because hearing the music:

Made her hold her hand in the pocket to keep from smashing it through the glass pane to snatch the world in her fist and squeeze the life out of it for doing what it did not did and did to her and everybody else she knew about. (59)

However, the most profound example of wildness is manifested in the character of Wild. Wild is the crazy, Black woman who lives in the caves with a pack of blue black birds and haunt the cane fields, the neighborhood, and bites Hunters Hunter. Golden Gray describes her as “a naked berry-black woman,” “with large and terrible eyes,” “covered with mud and leaves are in her hair.” (144) We know that she gives birth to Joe but she is too crazy even to nurse or mother him and abandons him. But Hunters Hunter who feels that “crazy people got reasons” (175) seems to know her reasons.

Even though her identity is never disclosed, it becomes evident that she has been a victim of brutal racial and sexual oppression which has turned her into a crazy wild character, unfit for social life or relationships, perpetuating “chief unmothering.” (167)

Golden Gray is too shocked to see her wildness and believes her to be a “vision.” (146) It illustrates a horrific truth of racist culture, incredible, unimaginable but “still out there, and real, so powerless invisible, wastefully daft. Everywhere and nowhere.” (167)

As conditions throughout the US, indeed the world in the 1930s are so oppressive for African people, there are traces of wild in everything and everyone. (Peterson 625) However towards the end, the characters are able to overpower the destructive factors which ravage their lives. Violet grows in self- knowledge through her friendship with and communication with Alice. It heals her inner fragmentation and nurtures an authentic self which can love herself and others better. Joe also is able to transcend his pain and renew his love for Violet. It leaves the mysterious

155

narrator exasperated because she has been expecting and craving for “pain” and “a few drops of blood” (Morrison 219) to mark the dissolution of their lives. I was sure one would kill the other. I waited for it so I could describe it. I was so sure it would happen. (Morrison 220)

The allusion to the Nag Hammadi Gnostic poems depicts the narrator as an Omniscient presence, a “female deity,” (Peterson 749) “an all seeing eye, all piercing too, one that can penetrate human motives and plans.” (748) But at the end she realizes her failure “to really penetrate human hearts and understand what being human means.” (749) Morrison highlights the power of human resilience which enables Blacks to change even the will of their Fate.

What Morrison implies is that “forgiveness is possible and self- forgiveness too. The crooked cannot be made straight but can be survived, left behind.” (Draper 258) The narrator, then becomes the book itself “commenting, risking, judging and learning” (Morrison xiii) as its characters continue to invent their lives.

Morrison’s Jazz thus captures the essence of the music in the lives of her characters and quest for their identity for her characters as a metaphor for freedom, change, originality and change (Morrison xii) because:

Whatever the truth or consequences of individual entanglement and landscape, the music insisted that the past might haunt us, but it would not entrap us. It demanded a future and refuse to regard the past … an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth would left the arm that held the needle. (Morrison x)

The novel is not about Jazz. It gives an account of the period where the Black Americans experience self-consciousness and try to assert their identities in the early decades of the 20th century. The novel describes the phenomenon of Harlem Renaissance faithfully. Joe and Violet came to Harlem with hopes and aspirations and a vision for a new role where they could find their true identities and discover their own selves. Their quest for a new life is in fact a quest for their identity. Their unhappy past experiences which they got as a legacy from their preceding generations were a great burden and they wanted to get themselves rid of the burden. Jazz is also a kind of music originated from the Black communities and often identified with the blacks. The energizing and life giving force of jazz originates from

156

mystery as the originators conceive it. There are lots of improvisations in jazz and the different musical notes and rhythms are used from various instruments in jazz making it vibrant all the time. That is how the Black Americans wanted to live and enjoy life.

Both jazz and their lives are characterized by passion and excitement. Tony Morrison deliberately chooses the title because the term jazz was originally used as a slang word for sexual passion which is symbolically extended in the jazz music and becoming the most famous kind of Black American music that produces pure emotions. Like many jazz elements, the dominant theme of the novel has been broken up into different parts, depicting various stories and voices. There are various motifs, images and relative themes in the novel as there are voices and musical notes in the jazz music. And like the jazz music, Toni Morrison’s novel is also inspired by a whole range of human feelings and comes back reportedly to the theme of human passions. As in the jazz music, the complicated action of the novel modulates back and forth, sometimes in very unexpected ways, highlighting the creative force of our passions, fantasy and imagination. At the end of the novel, the narrator and we, the readers or the listeners are also the participants in the whole story and are free to remark:

If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake one. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. (Morrison 229)

It is also confusing whether the narrator has been identified with the book itself, suggesting the open-endedness of life. Toni Morrison herself says about the construction of the novel:

Jazz was a very complicated because I wanted to represent two contradictory things – artifice and improvisation where you have an artwork, planned, thought through, but at the same time, appears invented like jazz. I thought of the image being a book. Physically a book, but at the same time, it is writing itself. Imagining itself. Talking. Aware of what it is doing. It watches itself think and imagine. (Draper 270)

According to Toni Morrison, Jazz predicts its own story. Sometimes it is wrong because of its faulty vision. Jazz cannot penetrate into the psyche of the characters thoroughly and fails to understand the powerful imagination of the human

157

beings as represented in the characters. The structure of the novel permits the characters of the novel to talk back as the jazz musicians do. It is Toni Morrison’s skill to present a simple story about people who are desirous of living with their own true selves awakening to life and thus fulfilling their quest for identity. The major characters of the novel have become victims of deception, lies and urban life. Even though the city is vibrant with dream and desire, Joe, Violet and Dorcas suffer from failure in their romantic loves. And their failures are intricately woven into the social fabric of racism. The novel gives an expression of a specific historical moment where the pains and agonies of the American Blacks searching their own identities are wonderfully depicted.

158

Works Cited

Bjork, Patrick Byrce. The Novels of Toni Morrison. New York: Paterlang, 1992. Print.

Carmean, Karen. Toni Morrison’s World of Fiction, Troy: The Whiston Publishing Company.

Draper, James P. et. al. Contemporary Literary Criticism Yearbook. vol. 81. New York: Gale Research Inc., 1994. Print.

Evans, Marie ed. Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. New York: Anchor Books/Anchor University Press, 1984. Print.

Gates Jr., Henry Louis and Appiah K.A. eds. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Print.

Gates Jr., Henry Louis and McKay Nellie eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004. Print.

Giroux, Christopher et al, Contemporary Literary Criticism. vol. 87. New York: Gale Research Inc., 1995. Print.

Giroux, Christopher. Contemporary Literary Criticism. New York: Gate Research Inc., 1995. Print.

Guthrie, Danille Taylor. ed. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Print.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K.A. Appieh E. Toni Morrison Critical Perspective: Past and Present. New York: Amistad. 1993.Print.

Holloway, F.C. and Demetrakopoulos Stephanie A. New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Print.

Louis Henry, Jr. Gates and Appiah K.A. ed. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Print.

Mckay, Nellie Y. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1988. Print.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage Books. 2004. Print.

- - - Jazz. Great Britain: Vintage. 2005. Print.

159

Morrison, Toni. Tar Baby. New York: Alfred A Knoff, 1981. Print.

Peterson, Nancy J. ed. Toni Morrison: Double Issue. West Lafayette: Purdue University, Fall/Winter, 1993. Print.

Rhodes, Lisa R. Toni Morrison: Great American Writer. New York: Franklin Watts, 2001. Print.

Y. Nellie, McKay. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1988. Print.

160

CHAPTER - 6

Conclusion

Chapter VI

Conclusion

Toni Morrison is a great American writer; she is an inspiration for many writers, artists and readers. By the time when the Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to her in 1993, she had already published the six novels, that have been discussed in the present thesis. Morrison, then sixty two years of age, captured the attention of the critics and scholars throughout the world and her works were translated in more than twenty different languages. The Nobel committee of the Swedish Academy called Morrison, “a literary artist of finest work,” who “gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” (Lisa R. Rhodes 8)

Toni Morrison marks a deep insight into the racial problems that are being confronted by the Blacks since their existence. Being African American woman, Morrison boldly presents Afro-American feminist consciousness through her literary endeavor as she strongly expresses her philosophy as a feminist. She is conscious about women’s life and problems and believes that feminist consciousness is the experience in a certain way of specific contradiction in the existing social order. As a result, her novels manifest and highlight Black women who are doubly differentiated in the form of male standard and poverty as well as Euro-American women’s standard. In her works, Morrison has explored the experiences and roles of Black women in a racist and male-dominated society. The unique cultural inheritance of African Americans is the center of her complex and multi-layered narratives.

Alice Walker, another great African American writer said when Morrison was given the Nobel Prize:

No one writes more beautifully than Toni Morrison. She has consistently explored issues of true complexity and terror and love in the lives of blacks. Harsh criticism has not dissuaded her. Prizes have not trapped her. She is a writer who deserves this honor. (14)

Morrison has created memorable African American characters who struggled to live their lives as full individuals with their triumphs and tragedies. Her characters

161

overcome the brutality of slavery, racial and economic oppression and sexism; they depend on their own inner strengths, spirituality and love of their African American culture. In her writings, Morrison shows the invisible bonds of the African American community. According to Morrison, her characters go through difficult circumstances. But by adhering to their true self and identity, they are able to shape their lives. By the end of her novels, as Morrison said, “People always know something profound and wonderful.” (9)

Toni Morrison’s career is as controversial as her novels are. In the late 1980s, some critics did not like her writing style whereas many other writers wonder why Morrison was not awarded the prestigious prizes. Some readers could not understand her novels easily and complained about her narrative techniques. Political conservatives have also criticized her exploration of the role of racism in American culture and literature. Toni Morrison has written mainly from neglected history of the African Americans and re-vitalized their identities. Her novels are lively and written lyrically.

She has the ability to dramatize realistic situations of the lives of the Black Americans and is capable of holding the attention of the readers to the compelling issues of racism and sexual politics. Her stories are amalgamations of historical, magical, supernatural and imaginative elements of the African Americans’ lives. Her stories are gripping, emotional and often based on the oral traditions of the Black American folk narratives. So, in her works, we can re-discover the history of African Americans and their cultural roots.

The present thesis makes an attempt to explore the concern for identity as Morrison created fascinating stories with a profound sense of history bringing to the forefront, the neglected, hidden and silenced voices of the African Americans. She has a design of constructing the experiences, perceptions and representations of racism in America through the sufferings and agonies of the Black Americans. Her novels probe the individual lives of people, their hopes and fears and the experiences of slavery.

Morrison is the most sophisticated novelist in the recent times in the history of African-American literature. She is an accomplished writer and has written with her own way of literary representation. In addition to this, her fictions analyzed the social

162

effects of race, gender and class. It is also believing that they were written with the great themes of lyrical modernism which included love, death, betrayal, and the burden of the individual’s responsibility for her or his own fate. The writer always caught attention of the critics and scholars of the time because of the themes the handles and the myriad subjects she deals with. She is one of the most critically acclaimed writers of present age.

She gets the credit as a major architect in creating a literary language for Afro- Americans. She skillfully uses various perspectives, fragmentary narrative that manifests the influence of writers like Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Her work marks the influence of African-American folklore, songs, and women’s gossip. She has created a literature that represents black sensibility with racial boundaries across the world.

Thus, it becomes a matter of great importance to understand Toni Morrison’s biography, her making as an artist, the influences and philosophies which shaped her creative world. The present chapter as a conclusion, is an attempt to trace out the above-mentioned elements.

The thesis is divided into six chapters. The first chapter gives an introduction to postmodernism and brief survey of black literature and works of Toni Morrison as it is necessary for a greater understanding of the characters and the settings. It also includes her family history, her student career and the impact of racism in her early life. This chapter also highlights the various challenges and traces of her literary career, touching upon her achievements and the remarkable events where she got fame and recognition not only in the United States but to the reading public of the world at large.

The second chapter is devoted to the definition and conception of black feminism, and the study of social and literary milieu in which Toni Morrison lived and worked. It gives an account of the socio-political, economic and the cultural background of the period of slavery and the development of racism in America. It has also studied the growth of African American modern writers and the various aspects of Black American movement which influenced Toni Morrison’s career and writing. Like any other Black person, Morrison experienced the impact of racism faced by the Blacks in America. The harsh reality of the poor Black Americans as one of the

163

important sources which influenced significantly her writings has also been highlighted.

This chapter also analyses deeply the influence of her family, books and other major writers on Toni Morrison and her response to them from her personal experiences which are reflected in her works.

This chapter also gives a brief account of the history of the Black people coming to America and the period of the development of slavery in different phases – ante-bellum America, the period of the Civil War and post-bellum. The struggle of the Black Americans for their emancipation from slavery and the awakening to a new consciousness in the phenomenon known as Harlem Renaissance has also been discussed in this chapter.

The subsequent movement of the Black Americans for the assertion of their identities in the two great World Wars and the movement of the famous Civil Rights in America has also been highlighted in this chapter. The chapter also discusses the considerable progress of the Black Americans in the social, economic and political areas and the rise of the growing Black middle class after the Civil Rights movement. However, centuries of racism and prejudice continue to haunt the lives of the Black people. Poverty, segregation, poor health conditions and violence are the glaring realities of the Black American people. Their place in American society is characterized by their heroic struggle for survival in the racist white American society.

This chapter has also investigated the development of Black American literature as the inevitable product of the compelling social and political circumstances of American society. Various slave narratives that influenced Toni Morrison have also been analysed briefly in this chapter. In the second half of the twentieth century, we see the emergence of the revolutionary aspirations of the Black Power Movement and the slogan “Black is Beautiful” has also been discussed in this chapter along with the Black Arts movement.

This chapter has also shown that Toni Morrison’s fame comes primarily from her novels with special appeal to develop the stories of the African Americans who are noticeably absent from the mainstream American literature. It also highlights the

164 emergence of Black women writing in American literature which are reflected in Harriet Jacobs, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison etc. The creation of female characters who liberate themselves and re- modeled the female image through their inner strength, rooted in Black culture has also been discussed. Black American writers argue against racism and sexism and insist on the recognition as Alice Walker said “In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own” and also as Audre Lorde observed that “the difference is a reason or celebration rather than reason for destruction.” (Wisker 23)

Toni Morrison joins other Black women writers in emphasizing the spirit of communal consciousness in the quest for the self. The chapter has also discussed the moving philosophy of Toni Morrison who was influenced by other great writers like Soyinka and Achebe and her evolution as a writer with deep insights into the world of racism which she explored in her fiction. Thus, this chapter analyzed the myriad threads woven into the novels of Toni Morrison where black people rise to reconstruct their lives against the inhuman exploitation based on race, gender and class.

The third chapter is devoted to the study of female authorship and women’s issues, Toni Morrison’s authorship, and review of author and theoretical frameworks.

The fourth chapter is devoted to study of racial issues and Black identity in the The Bluest Eye, Sula and Song of Solomon.

The Bluest Eye (1970) is Toni Morrison’s first novel.The story centers around the tragic story of a young black and poor eleven year old girl called Pecola Breedlove who desired blue eyes. Rural migrants from the south, the Breedloves were a miserable and poor family who dwelt in a store-front. However, their misery was not so much a result of their poverty as it was from their hatred for themselves and for each other. It was a grim family where the drunkard father Cholly and bitter mother Pauline fought and railed against each other. The son, Sammy often ran away from home. The young daughter, Pecola was ridiculed and shunned by peers, teachers and her own parents for her ugliness. So, she yearned for blue eyes which she believed would make her beautiful and lovable.

165

The novel tells a simple story but behind the simplicity lies grave and complex issues about black and white race relations. Racism is the feeling of inherent superiority of one race over another. Though racism as an ideology no more holds power, the implicit notion of the inherent inferiority of blacks has survived long enough to perpetuate the justness of power and privilege of white over the blacks. The various institutions of the society, political, legal, cultural, educational manifest this domination. Everywhere in the novel, white-skin, blond hair and blue eyes become the criteria for beauty. Naturally a poor black child like Pecola who is scorned by everyone for her ugliness and blackness must desire blue eyes to be acceptable and loved by those around her. Thus, Morrison’s main concern in the novel is the brutal reality of racism and the painful efforts of Blacks for self- definition in a society which denies them their true worth. In depicting Pecola’s cultural alienation which caused her tragedy, Morrison focuses on the importance of communal nourishment and acceptance for one’s wholeness.

In the second novel Sula (1973), Toni Morrison takes us away from the world of Black young girls to that of the adult world of Black woman and examines the possibilities for the Black woman in the achievement of her identity against the limitations of the society around them. Sula presents the story of two Black women characters whose different views about life and approaches to the achievement of selfhood lead to conflicts resulting in the fragmentation of their lives and relationships, pain, loss, and death. Sula Peace is a woman who never finds her place in her community.

Hollywood interprets Sula as an ideal of African concept of female creative potential which manifest a unity with nature, an embodiment of African spirituality within a culture whose survival threatens African values. The thorny, fire-color of her rose, the watery tadpole, earthbound snake which are seen in her birthmark on her forehead manifest the essential African archetype of fire, water and ground. Morrison sees Sula’s pursuit of such extreme feminine power within the oppressive white culture transforming into a dangerous freedom that contradict the very essence of Black womanhood rooted in the connection to community and responsibility. (Guthrie: 68)

166

Morrison’s story of the unique friendship of two Black women demonstrates the need for the synthesis of imagination with practicality, the struggle of survival with the joy of living, dreams with reality, vision with realization, freedom with responsibility and liberty with boundary in the Black woman’s search of her identity as a Black and a woman in America.

While her first novel, The Bluest Eye and Sula were works that centred on the lives of the Black woman and her quest for identity, Morrison’s third novel Song of Solomon presents a shift of her vision from the Black woman’s world to that of the Black man. Here Morrison continues to dwell on the theme of quest as she focuses on the Black man’s search for the achievement of his black self. Song of Solomon centers on story of Milkman Dead, a highly self-centered son of a Black capitalist father who exploits all those around him but not without a growing sense of alienation which disrupts and confuse his life. The latter part of the novel takes Milkman into a new world and events which changes him forever. The journey to hunt for a lost treasure ends up in the discovery the wealth of his family history. His physical journey embodies a spiritual journey from ignorance to wisdom, from death to rebirth. Morrison’s novel is a bildungsroman which focuses on the theme of the education or initiation of protagonist into manhood, in this case black manhood. Yet in the opinion of Catherine Carr Lee the novel reverses the conventional initiation pattern found in African or American literature. Instead of depicting the conventional initiation process, Morrison stresses on the movement of the protagonist from his isolated urban existence to his rural communal world because:

For the African American community in the twentieth century, however, Morrison suggests that the isolating individualism that erases the memory of the South destroys spiritual and moral identity. (Lee 1)

Milkman’s story of achievement of manhood shows a revision of the myth of the Black manhood. Morrison’s celebration of the freedom and mobility of Black men also highlights its contradictions. Song of Solomon stresses on the need for the Black man to transcend the isolating western individualism and embrace his community and culture and heritage for the achievement of his identity.

Chapter V is devoted of the study of the other three novels of Toni Morrison in their chronological order viz. Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz.

167

Tar Baby (1981), centers on the tumultuous relationship between two lovers from extremely different and conflicting economic and social backgrounds and its ultimate dissolution. Morrison draws on the African American folklore in the Uncle Remus Tales written by the white American writer Joel Chandler Harris. The novel brought controversial critical views. While critics including John Irving pointed out Morrison’s overdoes of dialogues and portrayal of fabulistic characters, others praised her for her beautiful language imagery and forceful message in the novel.

The novel represents the conflict between opposing concepts of Black self- definition determined by tradition and the contemporary present ending without the possibility of a solution. The novel’s ambiguous ending raises a lot of questions. While Jadine’s disconnection from her roots endangers herself, Son is redeemed by his folk-ways. Does it mean one should cling to the past and never look ahead to the future? If so, “ how will Son ever be able to function as a modern, twentieth century man?” (Coleman 71) On the other hand, does Jadine’s indictment point to the need for Black women to withhold their striving for freedom and concentrate more on their traditional responsibilities? The inconclusive ending underlines the confusing position of the Black men and women stranded between their past and present.

The female ant metaphor reinforces the ongoing dilemma within Jadine between an exclusively female struggle and existence and a life defined by human passions which Son embodies. The biblical epigraph at the beginning of the novel defines these conflicting contentions within Jadine.

Morrison dedicates her novel, Beloved to “the sixty million” of the Blacks who died due to slavery. This novel has been declared as the best novel of the past twenty five years by the New York Times Book Review in 2006.

168

Her confrontation with Beloved marks the confrontation with the past. Thus, Morrison portrays in the novel, characters whose past continue to keep them frozen in an inner guilt and pain that prevent them from living life fully. What Morrison insists is that confrontation of the unspeakable anguish and past is the basis for change and healing. The recovery of the self is possible only through collective help and sharing.

At the end of the novel, we see a repetition of lines, “It was not a story to pass on”, “It was not a story to pass on” and “This is not a story to pass on.” (323- 324) It implies that it is not a story to be taken lightly. It is also a story which is too terrible to relate. Beloved then stands for those millions who perished unknown and unmourned in slavery. The story which ends with her name ‘Beloved’ becomes a testimony to those ancestors whose presence continues to endure and demand the love and recognition of its progeny in order to survive.

The novel, Jazz focuses on a certain period in American history when Blacks driven by “Want and Violence: (Jazz 33) migrated from the south to the industrial cities of the north. Southern Blacks flocked the northern cities of Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago and New York. Harlem in New York, became, in James Weldon Jackson words, “The Negro capital of the world.” (Gates and McKay 955) the spirit of exuberance and liberty that permeated all walks of Black life of the period consummated in the great cultural and artistic ferment of the Harlem Renaissance and it finds its fullest expression in its music and jazz. But beneath the note of optimism, lurked the bleak realities of racism, poverty, the perils of their new life and freedom, anger, violence, sexual license and dislocation of values and identity.

169

Morrison highlights the power of human resilience which enables Black to change even the will of Fate. Morrison’s Jazz thus captures the essence of the music in the lives and quest for their identity for her characters as a metaphor for freedom, change and originality. The novel is not about Jazz. It gives an account of the period where the black Americans experience self-consciousness and try to assert their identities in the early decades of the 20th century.

The novel describes the phenomenon of Harlem Renaissance faithfully. Joe and Violet came to Harlem with hopes and aspirations and a vision for a new role where they could find their true identities and discover their own slaves. Their quest for a new life is in fact a quest for their identity. Their unhappy past experiences which they got as a legacy from their preceding generations were a great burden and they wanted to get themselves rid of the burden. Jazz is also a kind of music which originated from the Black communities and is often identified with the blacks. The energizing and life giving force of jazz originates from mystery as the originators conceived it.

There are lots of improvisations in jazz and the different musical notes and rhythms are used from various instruments in jazz making it vibrant all the time. That is how the Black Americans wanted to live and enjoy life, both jazz and their lives are characterized by passion and excitement. Tony Morrison deliberately chooses the title because the term jazz was originally used as a slang word for sexual passion which is symbolically extended in the jazz music and becoming the most famous kind of Black American music that produces pure emotions.

Like many jazz elements, the dominant theme of the novel has been broken up into different parts, depicting various stories and voices. There are various motifs, images and relative themes in the novel as there are voices and musical notes in the jazz music. And like the jazz music, Toni Morrison’s novel is also inspired by a whole range of human feelings and comes back reportedly to the theme of human passions. As in the jazz music, the complicated action of the novel modulates back and forth, sometimes in very unexpected ways, highlighting the creative force of passions, fantasy and imagination. At the end of novel , the narrator and the readers or the listeners are also the participants. However, it is also confusing whether the narrator has been identified with the book itself, suggesting the open-endedness of life.

170

The structure of novel permits the characters of the novel to talk back as the jazz musicians do. It is Toni Morrison’s skill to present a simple story about people who are desirous of living with their own true selves awakening to life and thus fulfilling their quest for identity. The major characters of the novel give an expression of a specific historical moment where the pains and agonies of the American Blacks searching their own identities are wonderfully depicted.

Toni Morrison was delving into this question of American identity and the ‘African’ presence in the inevitable assimilation process of the American composite culture. Paradoxically for the Black Americans, segregation against which they have been fighting for its eradication seemed the only means of preserving their identity. This feeling of ambivalence is, thus, reflected in the writings of the Black Americans. Naturally there is a distinctive feature of their writing which is quite different from the American literature. Toni Morrison just saw it as a conflict and not a problem. These two modes of life that exist to exclude and annihilate each other have been united to form Black identity. She also tries to explore alternatives, free from stereotype racist images and concepts in many of her works. She discusses friendships and relationships such as that of mother and son, mother and daughter, and sexual relationships where women make their own choices.

Toni Morrison carefully studied the African elements in American culture and tried to define the concept of ‘American Africanism’. Africanism does not suggest the varieties and complexities of African people or their descendants.

It simply means Blackness with which the African people have been identified; incorporating views, assumptions, readings and misreading that accompany learning about these people. According to Toni Morrison, “Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition that American education favor, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations and exercises of power, and meditations or ethnics and accountability.” (Morrison, Playing 7)

Tony Morrison says that when we investigate American literature with a deeper reading, we find the presence of racism in many discourses. Sometimes, ignoring the race and adopting a liberal gesture helps to promote the dominant culture of the whites. Toni Morrison considered American literature to be the meeting point

171

of the white Americans’ cultural tradition and the historical conditions of the growth of the nation. She calls it encounter with racial ideology.

Morrison’s work clearly shows that the identity of the people are to be found in the community itself and in the communal experience and not in the emergence of a society. And the search for individual self is also to be realized only in the community. The American society or discourse emphasizes the individual spirit and many Americans show respect for those individuals who go alone against all odds. Such romantic concept of defining the individual self is misleading, according to Toni Morrison. She writes:

When a character defies a village law or shows contempt for its values, it may be seen as a triumph to white readers, while Blacks may see it as an outrage. (Bjork viii)

This clearly shows that Toni Morrison’s recognition of the difference of sensibilities between the Whites and the Blacks. Toni Morrison now at eighty six years of age is still writing and there are many areas to be explored of her remarkable achievements as one of the first fiction writers of the world today. Recently, her interest seems to be inclined towards exploring new techniques and forms in opera.

However, it is an undeniable fact that she is sincerely a novelist. Her narrative techniques, style and language are some of the significant areas for further research. And a great writer like Toni Morrison, whose genius extends to all conceivable realms of fiction which are required to be investigated is definitely beyond the limited scope of the present thesis and which can be left for future scholars.

172

Works Cited

Bjork, Patrick Bryce. The Novels of Toni Morrison: The Search for Self and Place Within the Community. New York: Peterlang Publishing Inc., 1992. Print.

Gates Jr., Henry Louis and Appian K.A. edd. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004. Print.

Guthrie, Danille ed. Taylor. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Print.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage Books, 1987. Print.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Print.

Rhodes, Lisa R. Toni Morrison: Great American Writer. New York: Franklin Watts, 2001. Print.

Weixlmann, Joe et. al. Black American Literature Forum, vol. 20 Spring- Summer, no.1-2, 1986. Print.

Wisker, Gina. Toni Morrison: A Beginner’s Guide. Hodder & Stoughton: London, 2002. Print.

173

Bibliography BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources:

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye. New York: Knopf, 1970. Print.

---. Sula. New York: Knopf, 1973. Print.

---. Tar Baby. New York: Knopf, 1981. Print.

---. Beloved. New York: Penguin Group, 1987. Print.

---. Jazz. New York: Plume, 1992. Print.

---. Song of Solomon. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Print.

Secondary Sources:

Reference Books

Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998). Print.

Bloom, Harold. Toni Morrison. Bloom’s Major Novelist Series. 1999. Print.

Bouson, J. Brooks. Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison.2000. Print.

Burton W. Peretti, The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race, and Culture in Urban America, Music in American Life, ed. August Meier and John H. Bracey (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Print.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Chelsea House, 1990. Print.

Christian, Barbara. ―The Contemporary Fables of Toni Morrison.‖ Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993. 59-99. Print.

Conner, Marc C., Ed. The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Print.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nded. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.

Carmean, Karen. Toni Morrison’ s World of Fiction. Troy: Whitston, 1993. Print.

174

Craig Hansen Werner, Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994) Print.

Chodorow, Nancy 1. Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1994. Print.

David, Ron. Toni Morrison Explained: A Reader's Road Map to the Novels. 2000. Print.

Print.Emecheta, Buchi. The Joys of Motherhood. New York: George Braziller, 1979. Print.

Furman, Jan, ed. Toni Morrison's “Song of Solomon.” New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print.

Fultz, Lucille P. Toni Morrison: Playing with Difference. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Print.

Furman, Jan. Toni Morrison’s Fiction. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1996. Print.

Grimshaw, Jean. 1986. Feminist Philoshoper. Great Britain: Billing & Sons Ltd. Print.

Grewal, Gurleen. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison. 2000. Print.

Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Print.

Iyasere, Solomon O., and Marla W. Iyasere, eds. Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula: Selected Essays and Criticisms of the Works by the Nobel Prize-winning Author.Troy: Whitston, 2000. Print.

Jan Furman, Toni Morrison's Fiction, Understanding Contemporary Literature, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,1996) print.

Kolmerton, Carol A., Stephen M. Ross and Judith Bryant Wittenberg, editors. Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned. 1997. Print.

Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood P, 1998. Print.

175

Linden Peach, Toni Morrison, MacMillan Modern Novelists, ed. Norman Page (London: MacMillan, 1995) Print.

McKay, Nellie Y. and Kathryn Earle, editors. Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison. 1997. Print.

Middleton, David L., editor. Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism. 1999. Print.

McKay, Nellie Y. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: Hall, 1988. Print.

Michael Awkward, Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women's Novels (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Print.

Oyewumi, Oyeronke, ed. African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood.Trenton: Africa World P, 2003. Print.

O'Reilly, Andrea. Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Print.

Otten, Terry. The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989. Print.

Page, Philip. Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison's Novels. 1996. Print.

Peach, Linden, editor. Toni Morrison: Contemporary Critical Essays. 1998. Print.

Peterson, Nancy J. Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches.1997.Print.

Plasa, Carl, editor. Toni Morrison: Beloved. Columbia Critical Guides. 1999.Print.

Peterson, Nancy J., ed. Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1997. Print.

Reyes-Conner, Marc Cameron, editor. The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable. 2000. Print.

Rice, Herbert William, Toni Morrison and the American Tradition: a Rhetorical Reading. New York: Lang, 1998. Print.

Smith, Valerie “New essays on Song of Solomon.”Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print.

176

Soloman, Barbara H. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. New York; London: G.K. Hall: Prentice Hall International, 1998. Print.

Spellerberg, Ian F. and Morrison, Toni “The Ecological Effects Of New Roads: A Literature Review.” Wellington, N.Z.: Dept. of Conservation, 1998. Print.

Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto “Other sisterhoods: Literary theory and U.S. women of color.” Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Print.

Sumana K. The Novels of Toni Morrison: A Study In Race, Gender, And Class. New Delhi: Prestige, 1998. Print.

Samuels, Wilfred, and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Print.

Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 116. Print.

Tally, Justine “The Story of “Jazz”: Toni Morrison’s dialogic imagination.” Munster; London: Lit, 2001. Print.

Taylor-Guthrie, Danille “Conversations with Toni Morrison.” Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Print.

Terry, Jennifer Ann “‘Shuttles in the rocking loom of history’: Dislocation in Toni Morrison’s fiction.” Coventry: University of Warwick, 2003. Print.

Tong, R. 1989. Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction. London: Chapman & Hall. Inc. Print.

Tallack, Doughlas. 1987. Literary Theory at Work Three Text Great Britain: Biling & Son, Ltd. Print.

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Pocket Books, 1983. Print

Wilentz, Gay. Binding Cultures: Black Women Writers in Africa and the Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. Print.

Wahrol, R. R & Hemdl. D.P. 1991. Feminist; an anthology of literary theory and criticism. United States of America: Rutgers University Press. Print.

Wolfrey, Julian. 1999. Literary Theories for Reader and Guide. New York: New York University Press. Print.

177

Chapters in Book

Basu, Biman “The Black Voice and the Language of the Text: Toni Morrison's Sula.” (155-72) in Myrsiades, Kostas (ed.); Myrsiades, Linda (ed. ). Raceing Representation: Voice, History, and Sexuality. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Print.

Boudreau, Kristin “Pain and the Unmaking of Self in Toni Morrison's Beloved.” (258-76) in Iyasere, Solomon O. (ed. and in trod.); Iyasere, Marla W. (Ed. And in trod). Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula: Selected Essays and Criticisms of the Works by the Nobel Prize Winning Author. Troy, NY: Whitston, 2000. Print.

Dill, Bonnie Thornton. Race, Class, and Gender: Prospects for an All-inclusive Sisterhood. U.S. Women in Struggle: A Feminist Studies Anthology. Ed. Claire Goldberg Moses and Heidi Hartmann. Urbana: U. of Illinois P, 1995. 215-95. Print.

Dixon, Melvin. Like an Eagle in the Air: Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1990. 115-42. Print.

Eusebio Rodrigues, “Experiencing Jazz,” Modern Fiction Studies 39, no. 3-4 (Fall- Winter 1993), p. 733.

Fultz, Lucille P. “To Make Herself: Mother Daughter Conflicts in Toni Morrison’s Sula and Tar Baby.”(228-43) in Brown Guillory, Elizabeth (ed.).Women of Color: Mother Daughter Relationships in 20th Century Literature. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996. Print.

Gillespie, Diane, and Missy Dehn Kubitschek. Who cares? Women-centered Psychology in Sula. Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula: Selected Essays and Criticisms of the Works by the Nobel Prize-winning Author. Ed. Solomon O. Iyasere & Marla W. Iyasere. Troy: Whitston, 2000. 19-48. Print.

Grant, Robert “Absence into Presence: The Thematics of Memory and ‘Missing’ Subjects in Toni Morrison’s Sula.” (90-103) in McKay, Nellie Y. (Ed.). Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: Hall, 1988. Print.

178

Guth, Deborah “A Blessing and a Burden: The Relation to the Past in Sula, Song of Solomon and Beloved.” (315-37) in Iyasere, Solomon O. (ed. and in trod.); Iyasere, Marla W. (ed. and in trod.). Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula: Selected Essays and Criticisms of the Works by the Nobel Prize Winning Author. Troy, NY: Whitston, 2000. Print.

Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition.” (16-37) in Wall, Cheryl A. (Ed.).Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. Print.

Jones, Carolyn M. “Sula and Beloved: Images of Cain in the Novels of Toni Morrison.” (338-56) in Iyasere, Solomon O. (ed. and introd.); Iyasere, Marla W. (ed. and introd.). Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula: Selected Essays and Criticisms of the Works by the Nobel Prize Winning Author. Troy, NY: Whitston, 2000. Print.

Nnaemeka, Obioma. Introduction: Imag(in)ing Knowledge, Power, and Subversion in the Margins. The Politics of (M)othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature. Ed. Obioma Nnaemeka. London: Routledge, 1997. 1-26. 148. Print.

Parker, Betty Jean. Complexity: Toni Morrison’s Women. Conversation with Toni Morrison. Ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie. San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1994. 60-66. Print.

Reddy, Maureen T. The Tripled Plot and Center of Sula. Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula: Selected Essays and Criticisms of the Works by the Nobel Prizewinning Author. Ed. Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere. Troy: Whitston, 2000. Print.

Stein, Karen F. Toni Morrison’s Sula: A Black Woman’s Epic. Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula: Selected Essays and Criticisms of the Works by the Nobel Prize-winning Author. Ed. Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere. Troy: Whitston, 2000. 49-60. Print.

Stepto, Robert. Intimate Things in Place: A Conversation with Toni Morrison. Conversation with Toni Morrison. Ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie. San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1994. 10-29. Print.

179

Research Papers in Journals:

Atieh, Majda R. “The Revelation of the Veiled in Toni Morrison's Paradise: The Whirling Dervishes in the Harem of the Convent.” MELUS, 2011. 89-107. Vol. 36. Print.

Bass, Patrik Henry. “Head of the Class.” Essence (Time Inc.) 42.4 (2011): 85-85. Print.

Bass, Patrik Henry. “Magic Touch.” Essence (Time Inc.) 41.10 (2011): 168-68. Print.

Bast, Florian. “Reading Red: The Troping of Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Callaloo 34.4 (2011): 1069-87. Print.

Belluz, Julia, Nancy Macdonald, and Ken MacQueen. “Newsmakers: Gretzky Outsells Bieber, Kim Cattrall’s Sick of Sex and That City, and Two Canadian Retirees Vs. Mexican Gunmen.” Maclean's 2011: 9-9. Print.

Best, Stephen. “Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive.” Representations113.1 (2011): 150-63. Print.

Black, Kimberly. “Reviewing the Unspeakable: An Analysis of Book-Reviewing Practices of African American Women's Writings of the 1980s.” Black Women, Gender & Families 5.1 (2011). Print.

Blight, David. “Beloved.” Wall Street Journal - Eastern Edition 258.154 (2011): C10-C10. Print.

Bolaki, Stella. “Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa.” MELUS 36.2 (2011): 203-05. Print.

Chasar, Mike. “The Sounds of Black Laughter and the Harlem Renaissance: Claude Mckay, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes.” American Literature 80.1 (2008): 57-81. print.

Chauche, Catherine. “Beloved, a Principle of Order and Chaos in Toni Morrison’s Novel Beloved.” Imaginaires: Revue du Centre de Recherche sur l’Imaginaire dans les Littératures de Langue Anglaise 12 (2008): 345-58. Print.

180

Chevereșan, Cristina. “Dearly Beloved: Toni Morrison’s Resurrection of the African-American Narrative.” B. A. S.: British and American Studies/Revista de Studii Britaniceși Americane 14 (2008): 105-12. Print.

Childs, Dennis. “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet: Beloved, the American Chain Gang, and the Middle Passage Remix.” American Quarterly 61.2 (2009): 271-97. Print.

Christopher, Lindsay M. “The Geographical Imagination in Toni Morrison’s Paradise.”Rocky Mountain Review 63.1 (2009): 5. Print.

Clarke, Cheryl. “But Some of Us Are Brave and the Transformation of the Academy: Transformation?” Signs 35.4 (2010): 779-88. Print.

Collins, Michael. “My Preoccupations Are in My DNA”: An Interview with Bernardine Evaristo.” Callaloo 31.4 (2008): 1199-203. Print.

Colson, Whitehead, and Linda Selzer. “New Eclecticism: An Interview with Colson Whitehead.” Callaloo 31.2 (2008): 393-401. Print.

Copeland, Huey. “Glenn Ligon and Other Runaway Subjects.”Representations 113.1 (2011): 73-110. Print.

Copeland, Huey, and Krista Thompson. “Perpetual Returns: New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual.” Representations 113.1 (2011): 1-15. Print.

Cornis-Pope, Marcel. “Matei Calinescu: The Adventure and Drama of Modernity.” symplokē17.1-2 (2009): 255-60. Print.

Cox, James H., and Daniel Heath Justice. “From the Editors.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 21.4 (2009): ix-x. Print.

Cutrofello, Andrew. “It Takes a Village Idiot: And Other Lessons Cynthia Willett Teaches Us.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 24.1 (2010): 85-95. Print.

Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Elissa Schappell (Fall 1993). “Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134”. The Paris Review. Print.

Copeland, Huey. “Glenn Ligon and Other Runaway Subjects.” Representations 113.1 (2011): 73-110. Print.

181

Copeland, Huey, and Krista Thompson. “Perpetual Returns: New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual.” Representations 113.1 (2011): 1-15. Print.

Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie A (Spring 1992). “Maternal Bonds as Devourers of Women’s Individuation in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” .African American Review (Terre Haute, Indiana: Indiana State University) 25 (1): 51–59. Print.

Diala-Ogamba, Blessina. “Gothic Elements in Toni Morison's Beloved and Elechi Amadi’s the Concubine.” 2011. 410-24. Vol. 54. Print.

Diana, Vanessa Holford. “I Am Not a Fairy Tale”: Contextualizing Sioux Spirituality and Story Traditions in Susan Power’s the Grass Dancer.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 21.2 (2009): 1-24. Print.

Dias, Angela Maria. “Longe Do Paraíso: Jazz, De Toni Morrison, E Ponciá Vicêncio, De Conceição Evaristo.” Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea 32 (2008): 173-85. Print.

DiCicco, Lorraine. “The Enfreakment of America’s Jeune Fille À Marier: Lily Bart to Carrie Bradshaw.” Journal of Modern Literature 33.3 (2010): 78-98. Print.

Dobozy, Tamas. “The Morrison Songbook: Proliferation in Jazz.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 42.1 (2009): 199-215. Print.

Donadey, Anne. “African American and Francophone Postcolonial Memory: Octavia Butler’s “Kindred” and Assia Djebar’s “La Femme Sans Sépulture”.” Research in African Literatures 39.3 (2008): 65-81. Print.

Dove, Rita. “The Fire This Time.” Callaloo 31.3 (2008): 739-46. Print.

Doyle, Jennifer. “Blind Spots and Failed Performance: Abortion, Feminism, and Queer Theory.” Qui Parle 18.1 (2009): 25-52. Print.

Du, Lanlan. “Identity Politics and (Re) Construction: Toni Morrison Studies in China.”Tamkang Review: A Quarterly of Literary and Cultural Studies 38.2 (2008): 89-106. Print.

Du, Lanlan. “Kong Jian Ce Lue Yu Wen Hua Shen Fen: Cong Hou Zhi Min Shi Jiao Jie Du Bai You Wa Wa.” Foreign Literature Studies/Wai Guo Wen Xue Yan Jiu 30.6 [134] (2008): 76-82. Print.

182

Dismukes, Ondra Krouse. “Narrative Conventions and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison.” MELUS 36.2 (2011): 201-03. Print.

Dobbs, Cynthia. “Diasporic Designs of House, Home, and Haven in Toni Morrison's Paradise.” MELUS, 2011. 109-26. Vol. 36. Print.

Fabelo, Dora M., et al. “The Rights of Readers in Our Schools.” Language Arts 88.3 (2011): 238-43. Print.

Ferguson, Rebecca. “Of Snakes and Men: Toni and Slade Morrison’s and Pascal Lemaitre’s Adaptations of Aesop in Who’s Got Game?” MELUS, 2011. 53- 70. Vol. 36. Print.

Fowler, Doreen. “Nobody Could Make It Alone”: Fathers and Boundaries in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” MELUS, 2011. 13-32. Vol. 36. Print.

Fulani, Ifeona. “Gender, Conflict, and Community in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 32.2 (2011): 1-30. Print.

Grausam, Daniel. “On the Idea of in (Ter) Dependence: Paradise and Foreign Policy.” MELUS, 2011. 127-45. Vol. 36. Print.

Grewal, Gurleen. “A Mercy.” MELUS 36.2 (2011): 191-93. Print.

Hall, Alice. “Foreign Bodies: Portraiture and Photography in the Works of Toni Morrison.” Interdisciplinary Humanities 28.2 (2011): 56-66. Print.

Hevesi, Dennis (April 1, 1988). “Toni Morrison’s Novel ‘Beloved’ Wins the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction”. The New York Times. Print.

Itzkoff, Dave. “Alicia Keys to Take ‘Stick Fly’ to Broadway.” New York Times (2011): 3. Print.

Itzkoff, Dave. “Global Shakespeare Fest to Feature 70 Shows.” New York Times (2011): 3. Print.

Jurecic, Ann. “Empathy and the Critic.” College English 74.1 (2011): 10-27. Print.

Koolish, Lynda (Winter 2001). “To be Loved and Cry Shame’: A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved”. MELUS (Storrs, Connecticut: MELUS, University of Connecticut) 26 (4): 169–195. Print.

183

Kohzadi, Hamedreza, Fatemeh Azizmohammadi, and Shahram Afrougheh. “A Study of Black Feminism and Womanism in Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye from the Viewpoint of Alice Walker.” International Journal of Academic Research 3.2 (2011): 1307-12. Print.

Koo, Eunsook. “[The Betrayal of Love, Trauma Narrative and Subjectivity Formation: Toni Morrison’s a Mercy].” Journal of English Language and Literature/Yǒngǒ Yǒngmunhak 57.5 (2011): 813-38. Print.

Lauret, Maria. “How to Read Michelle Obama.” Patterns of Prejudice 45.1 & 2 (2011): 95-117. Print.

Le Fustec, Claude. “Never Break Them in Two. Never Put One over the Other. Eve Is Mary’s Mother. Mary Is the Daughter of Eve’: Toni Morrison’s Womanist Gospel of Self.” EREA: Revue Electronique d’Etudes sur le Monde Anglophone 8.2 (2011). Print.

Lipsitz, George. “Midnight at the Barrelhouse: Why Ethnomusicology Matters Now.”Ethnomusicology 55.2 (2011): 185-99. Print.

Lister, Rachel. “James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays.” MELUS 36.2 (2011): 196-98. Print.

Madsen, Deborah. “Out of the Melting Pot, into the Nationalist Fires: Native American Literary Studies in Europe.” American Indian Quarterly 35.3 (2011): 353-71. Print.

Magras, Lydia. “Toni Morrison and the Bible: Contested Intertextualities.” MELUS 36.2 (2011): 198-200. Print.

Moore, Geneva Cobb. “A Demonic Parody: Toni Morrison’s a Mercy.” Southern Literary Journal 44.1 (2011): 1-18. Print.

Moore, Geneva Cobb. “A Demonic Parody: Toni Morrison’s a Mercy.” University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 1-18. Vol. 44. Print.

Nicol, Kathryn, and Jennifer Terry. “Guest Editors’ Introduction Toni Morrison: New Directions.” MELUS 36.2 (2011): 7-12. Print.

Olaussen, Maria. “Approaching Asia through the Figure of the Slave in Rayda Jacob’s the Slave Book.” Research in African Literatures 42.3 (2011): 31- 45. Print.

184

Parvaneh, Farid. “A Paradise for Men or Women? The Paradox of Power in Toni Morrison’s Paradise/Un Paradis Pour Les Hommes Ou Les Femmes? Le Paradoxe De Puissance Dans Le Paradis De Toni Morrison.” Canadian Social Science 7.3 (2011): 17-20. Print.

Patterson, Robert J. ““Woman Thou Art Bound”: Critical Spectatorship, Black Masculine Gazes, and Gender Problems in Tyler Perry’s Movies.” Black Camera 3.1 (2011): 9-30. Print.

Perez-Pena, Richard. “With $30,000 for Graduation Talk, Rutgers Joins Colleges Paying Speakers.” New York Times (2011): 16. Print.

Peters, John. “Fabulous Fables.” Teacher Librarian 38.3 (2011): 19-19. Print.

Putnam, Amanda. “Mothering Violence: Ferocious Female Resistance in Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, and a Mercy.” Black Women, Gender + Families 5.2 (2011): 25-43. Print.

Qin, Sheng. “Toni Morrison's Gender Politics in Song of Solomon1/Politique De Genre De Toni Morrison Dans Le Chant De Salomon.” Canadian Social Science 7.2 (2011): 95-101. Print.

Rampell, Catherine. “Snookinomics: Profits from a Tan.” New York Times (2011): 10. Print.

Rice, Alan. “The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison.” MELUS 36.2 (2011): 184-86. print.

Royal, Derek Parker, and Amanda Siegfried. “Contemporary American Fiction and the Confluence of Don Delillo, Cormac Mccarthy, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and John Updike: A Roundtable Discussion.” Philip Roth Studies 7.2 (2011): 145-69. Print.

Wang, Chih-ming. “The X-Barred Subject: Afro-American Subjectivity in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” Studies in Language and Literature 9 (2000): 269-88. Print.

Wardi, Anissa J. “Inscriptions in the Dust: A Gathering of Old Men and Beloved as Ancestral Requiems.” African American Review 36.1(2002):35-53. Print.

185

Washington, Teresa N. “The Mother-Daughter Àjé Relationship in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” African American Review 39 (2005): 171-88. Print.

Watson, Reginald. “The Power of the ‘Milk’ and Motherhood: Images of Deconstruction in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Alice Walker’s the Third Life of Grange Copeland.” CLA Journal 48.2 (2004): 156-82. Print.

Weathers, Glenda B. “Biblical Trees, Biblical Deliverance: Literary Landscapes of Zora Hurston and Toni Morrison.” African American Review 39 (2005): 201- 12. Print.

Webster, William S. “Toni Morrison’s Sula as a Case of Delirium.” Tennessee Philological Bulletin: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Tennessee Philological Association38 (2001): 49-58. Print.

Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. “Ten Minutes for Seven Letters: Reading Beloved’s Epitaph.”Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 61.3 (2005): 129-53. Print.

White, Jonathan. “Restoration of our Shattered Histories’: Derek Walcott, The Middle Passage and Massacres of Native Americans.” Agenda 39.1-3 (2002): 295-318. Print.

Widdowson, Peter. “The American Dream Refashioned: History, Politics and Gender in Toni Morrison's Paradise.” Journal of American Studies 35.2 (2001): 313-35. Print.

Wolfe, Joanna. “Ten Minutes for Seven Letters’: Song as Key to Narrative Revision in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Narrative 12.3 (2004):263-80. Print.

Interviews:

Denard, Carolyn C., ed. Toni Morrison: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008.

Taylor-Guthrie, Danille. Conversations With Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press Of Mississippi, 1994. Print.

Dictionary/ Thesaurus/ Encyclopedia

The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia. Edited by Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu. – Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003

186

Webliography:

http://wiredforbooks.org/tonimorrison/ http://www.audiofilemagazine.com/features/A0419.html http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/tonimorrison/toni.htm http://wiredforbooks.org/swaim/ToniMorrison.ram

http:// scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/wm/poor/reply,

http:// Scriprotium.lib.duke.edu/wlm/blkmanif/html, accessed on March 2, 2007). http://hsph.harvad.edu/organizations/heathnet/WoC/feminisms/hooks.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarchy

http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/contemp/pamsetc/women/ws_3.htm, http://www.homework-online.com/beloved/index.asp http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/lakhia/morrison/biograph.html http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/01/11/home/15084.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june98/morrison_3-9.html http://www.carnegielibrary.org/locations/reference/magazines/all.html http://www.nobel.se/laureates/literature-1993-1-cv.html http://www.carnegielibrary.org/locations/reference/magazines/all.html http://www.carnegielibrary.org/locations/reference/magazines/all.html http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/01/11/home/15522.html http://catalog.einetwork.net/search~S1/eAAX-3842 http://catalog.einetwork.net/search~S1/eACD-0098 http://catalog.einetwork.net/search~S1/eAHH-4158

187