Julion Figurative Language

Possession can be expressed in many forms, some physical and some through things like work and personal debt and gains. This idea of possession is shown throughout Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, a tale that follows the Dead Family during their life in the 1930’s. The story mainly follows Milkman as he travels from Michigan to Virginia to learn the truth about himself. To do so he must confront his father and take control of himself. Although Milkman wants to take control and possession of his life, he must confront his family’s lust for possessions and break away from them, revealed by his grandfather’s journey, he sees the importance of leaving behind the conceptions and prejudice that have dispossessed him.

Morrison unfolds the story in a fragmented and elusive way because it serves a purpose: to allow us time to make our own

The most important family value that separates the Morrisons from others and permanently changes all Morrisons’ life, including Kate’s, is the unending desire for knowledge. Great-Grandmother’s thirst for

Toni morrison in the book home explores the complexities of femininity and masculinity. This topic has been a big source of discussion debate within literature and society. Through the use of characters such as frank Ycidra, lilly as well as others morrison challenges the common idea that women are more dependent on men than men are on women.

Morrison narrates events from the mother’s point of view, without sentimentality allowing the readers to

With Alice’s identity, the role of fashion has always been a factor in her family's identity for her as a child. This role of fashion and beauty is also present in her understanding of the culture of black women in the tribe. As with the example of her grandmother who was abused by her grandfather with being “a beauty”, Alice has learned from her family history that the preconceptions of what beauty is should not be something to shy away from or to use the term beauty as a way to fill the void in the way she lives her life. The lessons of identity from Lucas’

Bell’s article begins with references to several other African American writers – Du Bois, Baldwin, among others – to show readers that, while Morrison’s novel is very well written, she was not the first to write about “double consciousness” and/or remembrances of the past in African American’s lives. Bell asks how African Americans can be expected to handle all the difficult things they face because of racism and bias, and then he spends the rest of his article fleshing out how they deal with it and whether that is healthy for their psyche.

Toni Morrison’s canon is interwoven with extended themes and motifs— pieces of truth that she has sprinkled throughout every piece of literature she has created. A pair of her books in particular reveals a beautiful coupling of the origins and the outcomes of the destruction of identity. Beloved and A Mercy come together to illustrate the causes and effects of slavery on the enslaved. The already transparent nature of a slave woman’s identity is only attributed to the person who owns her. She is not her own; her thoughts do not belong to her; her actions are governed by the man who she belongs to. Through exploring the psyche of many of her female characters, Morrison maps out the connections between each demoralizing foundation that slavery lays down. Through the robbery of identity, female slaves are trained into believing false truths that tether them to their owners; making them completely unaware to the fact that they could, in fact, exist outside of their prisons.

This shows how Morrison presents typical patriarchal gender constructs, but transgresses them to show the harmful effects on a character's psyche, again reinforcing the idea that, to an extent, gender constructions determine relationships in the community and that this is important in order to conform in a patriarchal

Toni Morrison’s novel Sula explores black female life and relations conceived both within and outside sexist and racist influences and mediation. Morrison explores individual characters defined by racial and gender stereotypes while also presenting a focused rumination on a radical black female experience devoid of these oppressive classifications. Through the character Sula, Morrison creates a black female identity based on subjectivity, uninfluenced by the community’s societal gender expectations and lifestyle. Even though Sula possessed self-agency and autonomy, never adhering to her community’s standards, her self-assertion remains solely outside the racist and sexist environment and black community; she ultimately holds power over herself but she is unable to assert that power in “Bottom” as she is suppressed and ostracized, contained by avoidance and being characterized as “devil” and “witch” until she dies contently, knowing she lived freely, yet alone (hooks 150). Morrison’s presentation of Sula’s ostracization as a direct consequence of her ability to constitute

Morrison shows that Black women suffer fatal types of violence even from their close family members. Abuse of and sexual assault to Black females in this novel come from both Black and White males. The Bluest Eye, among other important themes, is also a narrative of incestuous rape. In this novel Pecola’s story ends tragically. Generally each woman in this novel suffers some attack on her integrity and female

In her essay "Beloved: A Question of Identity," Christina Davis discusses the issue of identity from an historical perspective, a textual perspective and an authorial perspective. She looks at the text in comparison to the slave narrative, explores how the text itself expresses issues of identity and describes Morrison's choices of authorship and their contribution to identity. Her exploration of the theme of identity calls upon the treatment of self-image, particularly in the context of slavery; and outward image as expressed by naming and other white descriptions of the black characters. Her organization of information is historically sequential, ordering elements as they occurred

The emotion behind Drummond’s cooking was reflected in the rest of women who fit this persona. This emotion and placement in the domestic kitchen displays the traditional feminine characteristics of emotionality and domesticity.

Therefore Morrison's novel must be viewed not only as a retelling of a former slave who committed infanticide and what becomes of her but, as a history of an actual event and the parameters under which it occurred.

When such caring disappears, disastrous results ensue. Thus, Morrison offers a part of the pattern of black interaction that sustains against the dissolution represented by Pauline’s refusal to mother her children, Geraldine’s distortion of the notion of family and Cholly’s destructive abuse of his daughter.