Toni Morrison

Pauline Breedlove, like her husband Cholly, is-at first-portrayed as just another antagonist in the novel, helping push Pecola further and further to insanity. Morrison makes it a point to illustrate how Pauline arrives in her state as an antagonist; she does not just create empty monsters; she tries to make all of the antagonists sympathetic in some way to justify how they become so. After moving up north with

Toni Morrison The issue of abandonment and the will that it takes to survive the hardship of it is a reoccurring theme in Toni Morrison’s writing. Tar Baby, Sula and Paradise all deal with the issue of abandonment and how it relates to the characters in her stories. “Through her fiction, Toni Morrison intends to present problems, not their answers” (Moon). Her stated aim is to show "how to survive whole in a world where we are all of us, in some measure, victims of something." (Morrison)

The Sacred Language of Toni Morrison         Toni Morrison makes a good point when, in her acceptance speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, she says, “Narrative . . . is . . . one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge” (7).  The words we use and the way in which we use them is how we, as humans, communicate to each other our thoughts, feelings, and actions and therefore our knowledge of the world and its peoples.  Knowledge is power.  In this way, our language,

My topic for my Independent Study Project is the way Toni Morrison, author of Beloved, uses the supernatural to retell a true story ("Margaret Garner Incident ") of Sethe , a former slave's past. The story of Sethe's previous life as a slave is brought to life by a ghost that is said to be her dead daughter Beloved whom she murdered 18 years ago (Demme, Beloved). Beloved, first a ghost, who then possesses a body of a young woman, recaps Sethe's choices she made to protect her child from a life of

Toni Morrison Exposes Twentieth Century Beauty Standards in The Bluest Eye In the 1960s a second wave of feminism rushed through America; focused on dismantling barriers in the workplace and changing the image of the ‘ideal woman.’ However, many women of color were not included in the feminist movement. Toni Morrison recognizes the feminist issues concerning black women and “interrogates and deconstructs the long-held stereotypical images of black women” through characters in her book (Chick). Her

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison      Beauty is said to be in the eyes of the beholder, but what if the image of beauty is forced into the minds of many? The beauty of a person could be expressed in many different ways, as far as looks and personality goes, but the novel The Bluest Eye begs to differ. It contradicts the principle, because beauty is no longer just a person’s opinion but beauty has been made into an unwritten rule, a standard made by society for society. The most important rule

the two girls share as a result of their juvenescence--or does it? In Toni Morrison 's Sula, this scene, among others, appears at first to be both irrelevant to the novel’s underlying theme and out of place with regard to the rest of the plot. Yet, when analyzed further, the literary devices that Morrison uses in these scenes bring readers to a vastly different conclusion. These scenes serve as windows into the mind of Morrison and even into the larger themes present in the text. So, perhaps two girls

But what remains the same in a person after all these years? Toni Morrison, in her novel Sula, suggests that our inner selves do not change as much as we think. Through a consistent emphasis on body parts, color, and physical appearance, Morrison illustrates the coexistence of change and stability that lie within each person’s body and identity. Though it appears that people can easily alter their identities to fit their desires, Morrison ultimately emphasizes that one’s identity does not change over

“There is no protection. To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal. Even if scars form, the festering is ever below” (Morrison 163). Toni Morrison, in her novel A Mercy, suggests that women in 17th century American society were constantly subjugated as inferiors no matter their class or privilege. Although Rebekka and Widow Ealing were both privileged, white women, they still faced the societal pressures that harmed the mother-child relationships among the slaves – Lina,

In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison utilizes a circular narrative to emphasize the similarities, or lack thereof, between her characters. In Philip Page’s article, “Circularity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” he writes, “The plot is developed through repetition and variation of one or more core-images in overlapping waves... And it is developed through... the spiraling reiteration of larger, mythical acts such as birth, death, rebirth, quest-journeys, and the formation and disintegration of families”