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Chapter- IV
Feminism and Toni MorrisonFeminism is a collection of social, political movements, and moral
philosophies largely motivated by or concerned with the liberation of women.
In simple terms, feminism is the belief in social, political and economic
equality of the sexes, and a movement organized around the belief that gender
should not be the pre-determinant factor shaping a person’s social identity or
socio-political or economic rights. It involves the numerous and frequently
normative meanings given to sexual difference by various cultures and
societies. It is not just a biologically based category. Furthermore, sex/gender
systems differ cross-culturally. It is a key structural principle. Therefore,
supporters of feminism squabble with that gender is a crucial category of
analysis. It is a radical notion that women are human beings. It, as a movement,
is about women living on equal terms with men. It is not revealing and
critiquing biases. It is a serious attempt to understand beliefs and practices
from the viewpoint of the women and other marginalized groups. Feminists
consider that existing disparities must be removed between dominant and
marginalized groups. Feminism is a term put in practice to cover ideas and
theories well beyond what many consider to be the ‘bra burning’ ideals often
publicized feminists of the 1960’s and 70’s. It can, in point of fact, be broken
down into three very distinct theories: Feminism, Post-Feminism and Queer
Theory.
Feminism is well known of the notion that women have been excluded,
suppressed and exploited. This criticism is feminism in its major sense. Apart
from this, it deals with all of the political and social implications of sexual
repression. It also throws light on how sexuality is dealt with in all vicinities of
culture. It also lays a hand on masculine roles and sexuality, and embraces it in
its sense of what delineates oppression.
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In the American literature, and particularly in the Black literature,
feminism and racism have played crucial roles. Both these isms perform
massive role in their lives. In fact, writers of African American literature would
base the events that were taking place in the world around them and
incorporate them into their novels. This is the strong and dominant voice in
their literature. Of course, there are many reasons that the treatment of African
Americans in America was filled with brutality and hate. However, they have
also suffered by the attempts of white slave owners to try and erase not only the
history of African Americans, but their heritage as well.
They had to work; and according to the aesthetics of
this country, they were not beautiful. But neither were
they men. Any aggressiveness or intelligence on their
part, qualities necessary for participation in the work
world, were constructed as unwomanly and tasteless
(Barbara 72).
The birth of women writers, the growth of female education, the
development of teaching as a female profession, and the intensification of a
women’s literary market are consequently the entire consistent lexis of
feminism in a capitalizing global economy. Women writers became inseparable
part of the literary backdrop, other than until the end of time as representatives
of their gender rather than as individuals. It is also true that publishing was a
balancing act for each of them.
Morrison became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1993. Undoubtedly, she is “one of the finest
contemporary writers in America” (Faly 122). Her fictional world was
celebrated for its ‘epic power’ and ‘unerring ear for dialogue and richly
expressive depictions of black America’ by the Swedish Academy. Apart from
this, while investigating the difficulties of sustaining a sense of black cultural
identity in a white world particularly through her female protagonists, her
fiction considers the devastating effects of racism and sexism and integrate
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fundamentals of tradition and legends. “My attempt, although I never say any
of this until I’m done… is to deal with something that is nagging me, but, when
I think about it in a large sense, I use the phrase ‘bear witness’ to explain what
my work is for” (LeClair 25).
Beloved is Toni Morrison’s fifth novel. Published in 1987 as Morrison
was taking pleasure in growing popularity and accomplishment. Beloved
became a best seller and received the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is
widely considered Morrison’s greatest novel to date. Beloved puts issues of
power and powerlessness, choice and accountability; ownership of property,
self, and others; individual action vs. communal action against the backdrop of
feminism. In 1987, it won the Pulitzer Prize. It is considered as her
masterpiece. It is about an enslaved girl who had been locked up by a white
man for sexual exploitation. It is marked as a newborn baby when she enters
the narrative. She is believed to be Sethe’s daughter, Denver’s sister. She might
also be a survivor of the Middle Passage; the traumatic journey across the
Atlantic Ocean into American slavery; a compilation of all of the enslaved
peoples who died.
Beloved’s portrayal of “men without skin” (B 248). Africans supposed
the first Europeans they saw as skinless because they didn’t have dark
complexions. Another textual detail that supports this interpretation is the
roaring of voices that Stamp Paid hears when he visits 124, but cannot not
enter, or even knock. He does not hear only one ghostly voice (Beloved’s)—he
hears many. These may be the ‘Sixty Million and more’ to whom Morrison
dedicates her novel on the page before the epigraph. Baby Suggs doesn’t
approve of extra: she claims that “good is knowing when to stop” (B 102). The
picnic feast to celebrate Sethe’s escape from slavery is described as offending
the community by its excess; further, Paul D tells Sethe that her love is “too
thick” (B 193).
Sethe is not the only mother in the novel to kill her children. When she
is a child, Sethe is told by Nan that her mother ‘threw away’ the children before
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her. Sethe is the only one she goes on for the reason that she is the only child
not born out of rape. Ella turns down to breastfeed her newborn baby, and it
dies after five days. These women kill out of abhorrence for their abusers and
rapists; Sethe, however, kills out of love. Her murder of Beloved is as an act of
too much love. She loves her children too much to allow them to be put
through the brutality of slavery in the forms of physical, mental, and emotional.
Morrison raises many unanswered questions to think over these serious
issues. In fact, what it means to be a mother generally, and what it means to be
a mother in slavery. Think about Sethe’s relationships with her biological
mother, Nan, and Baby Suggs; Baby’s relationships with her children, etc.
Beloved exists wholly beyond its own artistic merits and demerits. As a
result, this novel becomes something more than mere literature. This novel is
not solely a work of protest and advocacy, as the author herself has insisted. It
is not solely a symbol for the progress and virtue of the prestige-granting
institutions in American letters. It’s a serious creative work of art. It earns to be
the highest respect.
Beloved is a haunting and dark novel. It is full of gothic elements and
acts of terrible violence. The ghost represents the power of the legacy of
slavery. The ghost keeps on troubling Sethe eighteen years after she won her
freedom. Beloved is the fortitude of the dead baby revisited but she is also a
personification of all torment under slavery. The novelist is more anxious that
the readers apprehend why Sethe did what she did, as well as the ways that her
choice has troubled her ever since. The narrative efficiently puts into words the
cruelty and dehumanization that comes about under slavery, putting Sethe’s act
in context without unavoidably accusing it or excusing it. “To be black and
female was to be in Double Jeopardy” (Beal 90).
The structure of the novel is fragmentary, closely tied to the
consciousness of each character and weaving suddenly between past and future
through the strong thread of feminism in terms of humanism. More space is
exhausted describing past events than the current action. It strikingly brings
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forth the idea that the past lingering and shaping life in the present. It is often
monotonous, putting the same storyline of the past repeatedly, giving further
information with each repetition. All of the characters in the novel, former
slaves and the children of former slaves, undergo a distressed relationship to
their own past. Their relationships to their past frequently make it unfeasible
for them to live for the present or plan for the future, and slavery has often
smashed the ways that they experience love and think about their own worth as
human beings.
In Beloved, Morrison explores themes of love, family, and self-
possession in a world. Beloved is the ghost of Sethe’s murdered child, returned
for uncertain causes. It is personified as a full-grown woman at the age that the
baby would have been had it lived. Morrison was strained to the historical
relation, which addressed varied questions of what it meant to love and to be a
mother in a place and time where life was often devalued. The novel forcefully
renders the implications of what it means to be owned by another and the
intricacy of owning oneself.
Beloved also presents a powerful account of the foundation of black
America in the light of feminism. The novel to some extent recounts the
formation of a new people and culture, a people displaced and forced to forge a
new identity in the face of brutality and dehumanization. It reflects on the
subtle balance between individual and community, between Self and Other.
The community anger at Baby Suggs’ individual success leads them to
ignore the riders and their ‘responsibility’ as a community to warn and protect
one of their own, which in turn leads to the crawling already baby’s death. No
one sings when Sethe is taken from 124 Bluestone Road to be imprisoned for
the murder; however, the community of women comes together at the end, both
in the food donations and the thirty singing women who come to ‘baptize’
Sethe and exorcise the ghost.
Morrison puts observations on the gender and class inequities existing in
the American society. Baby Suggs and Mrs. Garner stand beside one another
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and work together at Sweet Home; Amy Denver and Sethe struggle
“appropriately and well” (B 99) during the birthing of Denver. These
relationships are not entirely idealized, on the other hand, in that both Amy and
Mrs. Garner are the children of their era: they have been formed by the racist
ideology of their communities.
Consequently, the narrative puts forth a story about a slave’s life. It
notifies of whippings, rape, hard work, and escape. However, while depicting
this narrative of enslavement and black culture, Morrison also enlightens the
personal tales of strong female slaves. “All of the learned behavior and learned
emotions on the part of a group of people towards another group; whose
physical characteristics are dissimilar to the former group behavior and
emotion that compel one group to… treat the other on the basis of its physical
characteristics alone, as if, it did not belong to the human race” (Hernton 175).
Morrison’s novel centers mainly on the female characters, Sethe, Baby
Suggs, Beloved, and their relationships. Beloved can be seen as a feminist
novel. Even though, the novel informs the story of many slaves, since of its
heart on the practical and independent women in the novel. It also constructs a
feminist statement.
Beloved herself is the fundamental pattern of the female body being
written into the discourse. Her skin is like a baby’s, she sleeps a lot, and her
faculties of speech and movement are not well developed. The novelist marks
the mother-child bond in the state of perfect identification with the mother
through the body of Beloved. Physically, she is the personification of the
discourse of motherhood for a slave. Her body is a sacrifice that gives life the
other children from schoolmaster through her death. By asking Paul D to have
sex with her, she takes away his ‘tobacco tin heart’ into her ‘inside part’ and
makes him whole again. She feeds on the attention and the maternal guilt that
has been poisoning her life from Sethe. Beloved’s body is used to write the
resolution of all the conflicts that Paul D and Sethe had because of
schoolmaster’s cruelty.
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Sethe’s murder of her baby, which the community finds as an
unforgivable crime. On the other hand, the community did not advise Sethe of
schoolteacher’s arrival for the reason that of an inconsequential suspicion.
Consequently, the community is also responsible for blame for the murder.
Contrastingly, there are characters like Stamp Paid and Paul D, who do what
good they can, and try to survive in their post-enslavement world. As a result,
the readers can explore the binaries of good and evil against the backdrop of
feminist ideas.
The novel offers the narration of painful experiences of a female slave
by writing her body itself into the text. Its storyline is fluid, non linear, and it
preserves the difference between the many opposing units, giving them room
for free play. It monitors the enormity of the events that took place, and the
depth of its emotional experience. At the end of the book, Morrison’s character
says that ‘this is not a story to pass on’. This manifests the serious tone of the
novel. Nobody can deny the fact that it is a feminine text, and that by itself is a
rare occurrence the writing of a woman’s body and experience into a text. The
past is unknown that is mocked out through the rememorize of the characters in
the present. It is a centre around which the storyline unveils; leaping in and out
of the timeline in twists of revelation till it is laid out in all its horror. The
reading of the story becomes similar to the unraveling of a mess of
metaphorical threads.
The characters in the story are unconscious of their past. The storyline is
a continuous learning process where the characters learn more about
themselves. Sethe did not identify the fate of Halle, until Paul D tells her. She
does not retain information about her own mother until Beloved asks her about
it. The community is not aware of Beloved, or the strange ‘thick love’ that
Sethe has for her children. The characters also most often cannot divorce from
the past and live in the present.
The character of Beloved herself is the very essence of the past and
present intertwined in a consciousness. Her behavior puts her as a baby. Her
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supernatural sign is the consequence of unresolved inconsistency in the mother-
child bond between Sethe and Beloved. The character of Beloved is a position
of play where the slavery of the past, and the state of freedom in the present
collapse. She is murdered by her mother to set aside her from the dreadfulness
of slavery. Her death is because of by one side of the binary. When she gets
there at 124 in the form of the young woman, she causes the temporal binary to
collapse. She makes Sethe keep in mind her mother, and the forgotten African
language of her childhood. Sethe’s at first declines to accept Beloved as her
dead baby and accordingly refuses the past for the reason that of her maternal
guilt. But in doing so, she is in this world where she is preoccupied by the past.
For the period of her time at 124, Beloved outlines a kind of bubble inside
which the past and the present are one, and old harms are called forth,
remembered and put to rest. She is an embodiment or a ghost of the past,
walking in the present, effecting the exorcism of the horrors of the very past
that she embodies. In terms of the feminism of the novel readers can observe
the binaries of good/evil in the novel.
Jazz is full of orphans-parentless children whose parents die. “First
reduced the human self of his black slave to a body and then the body to a
thing; he dehumanized his slave, made him quantifiable, and thereby absorbed
him into a rising world market of productive exchange” (Kovel 18). Dorcas’s
parents are killed in the riots; Vera Louise is disowned, and so her parents are
dead to her; Rose Dear and May lose their mother when Vera Louise chooses
to take True Belle away; Rose Dear, who is Violet’s mother, commits suicide.
Ultimately, Violet’s and Joe’s demons look as if to get exorcised. They
both get themselves in the symbolic company of their mothers: while they are
in bed together, Joe observes a shape in the darkness that “forms itself into a
bird with a blade of red on the wing. Meanwhile Violet rests her hand on his
chest as though it were the sunlit rim of a well and down there somebody is
gathering gifts […] to distribute to them all” (J 225). In turn, the couple can
become sort of surrogate parents to Felice. Violet teaches her to look at trees
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and make up the world the way she wants it, and Felice compares Joe more
favorably to her father (J 214).
Nevertheless, Morrison moves toward to what the blues and jazz signify
in the larger cultural context of early twentieth-century African American
urban culture, which is a multifaceted interlinking of tropes of the blues, jazz,
and Harlem itself. That is worthy of a more thorough discovery. The readers
can perceive how Morrison’s innovative narrative strategies make articulate a
heretofore repressed and silenced black female’s story and voice. In the case of
Jazz, ‘voice’ as referring to the cultural object by which black women’s
narratives have been and are still commonly ‘heard’; the novel both cites what
Houston Baker, Jr. calls the ‘blues matrix’. It also evinces how it fails to
account for the migration experiences of African American women by looking
back to the cultural moment between the blues and jazz. Of course, that gives a
new way to the recording and stylization of the ‘classic blues,’ a specifically
female cultural form largely disseminated through the ‘race record’ market.
Such context is indispensable in reading Morrison’s intricately layered text.
Her all-encompassing implication on blues, jazz, and Harlem imagery, as well
as her figurative use of the narrator as technological composite of the
phonograph and record to ‘play’ cultural narratives which its characters both
retort to and refuse to agree to create an African American female ‘crossroads.’
The narration of Jazz is an impersonal. It enlightens stories not only
about its characters, but about itself as a cultural form as well. The narratives
personified in the sign of the blues to which the novel’s title submits are turned
into in the narrator’s onomatopoeic descriptions of the characters’ exchanges
with the urban landscape. This analogy appeals to the material conditions of
African American men and women who migrated to Northern cities in the early
twentieth century, and turns ‘unreliability’ into a cause for celebration. At the
end of the novel, the narrator, allegorically ‘playing’ a record on a phonograph.
The narrator of the novel deals with how these recent migrants must
have felt at arriving in a Harlem whose population was comprised almost
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wholly of African Americans, and she does so with specific reference to the
city’s sidewalks and streets:
However they came, when or why, the minute the
leather of their soles hit the pavement--there was no
turning around. Even if the room they rented was
smaller than the heifer's stall and darker than a
morning privy, they stayed to look at their number,
hear themselves in an audience, feel themselves
moving down the street among hundreds of others who
moved the way they did (J 32-33).
It is clear from this passage those only direct references to the often crowded
and expensive living conditions encountered by black migrants, however, also
metaphorical encodings of the material circumstances of their survival before
migrating to the city.
Violet is the main character in Jazz. The narrator’s depiction of her
‘private cracks’ is a montage of images that question her. It is perhaps African
American women’s in general, relationship to the Harlem community and to
the social world:
I call them cracks because that is what they were. Not
openings of breaks, but dark fissures in the globe light
of the day. She wakes up in the morning and sees with
perfect clarity a string of small, well lit scenes. In each
one something specific is being done: food things,
work things; customers and acquaintances are
encountered, places entered. But she does not see
herself doing these things. She sees them being done.
The globe light holds and bathes each scene, and it can
be assumed that at the curve where the light stops is a
solid foundation. In truth, there is no foundation at all,
but alleyways, crevices one steps across all the time.
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But the globe light is imperfect too. Closely examined
it shows seams, ill-glued cracks and weak places
beyond which is anything. Anything at all. Sometimes
when Violet isn’t paying attention she stumbles onto
these cracks, like the time when, instead of putting her
left heel forward, she stepped back and folded her legs
in order to sit in the street (J 22-23).
The mind gaps Violet faces are equal to the gap in a record that make it bounce
consequently it is incapable to carry on its playing, a relationship that puts
forward the intricacy of the relationship between African American women’s
lives and diverse deterministic cultural narratives.
Violet is treated as ‘crazy’ by her community for sitting in the street, as
well as for ‘stealing’ a baby and later attempting to disfigure Dorcas’s body at
the funeral. Rodrigues thinks Violet as ‘the one whose psyche has been
deformed by twenty years in the City, so that people call her ‘Violent.’’ The
sidewalks of Harlem are stood for in a way that exclusively calls notice to the
blues narratives against which the characters struggle. That during Joe’s search
for Dorcas country trails turn to railroad, then city pavement ‘tracks,’ which
Morrison also relates to the grooves of a record, suggests that the fatalism often
attributed to the City has its roots in the South and the economic, cultural, and
psychological impacts of slavery. When Alice inquires Violet if Joe had ever
beaten her, anybody can get a unique reference to this narrative intersection:
“Joe? No. He never hurt nothing.”
“Except Dorcas.”
“And squirrels.”
“What?”
“Rabbits too. Deer. Possum. Pheasant. We ate good down home.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“Landowner didn’t want rabbit. He want soft money.”
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“They want money here, too.”
“But there’s a way to get it here. I did day work when I first came here.
Three houses a day got me good money. Joe cleaned fish at night. Took
a while before he got hotel work. I got into hairdressing, and Joe . . .”
“I don’t want to hear about all that.”
Violet shut up and stared at the photograph. Alice gave it to her to get
her out of the house (J 81-82).
This manifests the historical, economic, and social conditions of African
American women. The novelist through the narrative trope of the race record
encodes in the storyline especially the complicated, often jealous and
sometimes violent responses of both men and women to their post-
emancipation freedom of choice in sexual partners. The author’s motivation for
the photograph of Dorcas, whom Violet stabs out of sexual jealousy, came
from a photograph taken by James Van Der Zee of a young woman shot by her
lover at a party with a gun that had a silencer: ‘As she lay dying, the young
woman refused to identify the person who shot her.’
Violet’s own relationship to reproduction has been over-determined by
the financial matter of slavery. Her response to Rose Dear being tipped out of
her chair by the men who took almost all of her family’s property is crucial.
Like many traveling female blues singers, motherhood was simply not
something she considered as a possibility: “The important thing, the biggest
thing Violet got out of that was never to have children. Whatever happened, no
small dark foot would rest on another while a hungry mouth said, Mama?”
(J 102).
Violet’s marginal position in the salon community functions as an
analogue both for women such as Alice and Gertrude. Alice denouncing the
disorderly, raucous, and now and then vengeful lyrics of female blues singers
like Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey and Bessie Smith, as well as for women’s peripheral
involvement in early jazz performance. Violet is an unlicensed hairdresser, and
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thus not privy to the talk that takes place among the legally licensed beauticians
and their customers at the salon, until she goes to find out “what kind of lip
rouge the girl [Dorcas] wore; the marcelling iron they used on her . . . the band
the girl liked best (Slim Bates’ Ebony Keys which is pretty good except for his
vocalist who must be his woman since why else would he let her insult his
band)” (J 5). The narrator’s remark on the female vocalist unities with Linda
Dahl's claim that family bands permissible virtually the only opportunity for
women to participate in jazz, most bands being ‘made up completely of men.’
These circumstances are similar to Violet’s denied access, because of her
crazy, ‘unlicensed’ behavior, not only to the salon's communal discourse but to
almost any kind of voice in her community.
Violet’s “wayward mouth” (J 24) ostracizes her from mainstream
community circles of women and men long with her ‘crazy’ actions. Her
leaning to form “[w]ords connected only to themselves” (J 23) could also refer
to criticisms of women’s classic blues being progressively standardized in their
recording and dissemination, and thus not ‘authentic’ in their loss of specific
regional qualities. Her position as outcast, on the other hand, permits her an
intracultural ‘double-consciousness.’ Therefore, she is imposition to identify
with both Alice, an upstanding member of the community, and the prostitutes
at the same time for the reason that much as the sexually charged women's
classic blues tolerable for the expression and survival of an African American
female communal voice, the prostitutes, Violet is aware of, are important to her
own survival:
“They were good to me when nobody else was. Me and Joe
eat because of them.”
“Don’t tell me about it.”
“Anytime I come close to borrowing or needing extra, I can
work all day any week on their heads.”
“Don’t tell me, I said. I don’t want to hear about it and where
their money comes from” (J 84).
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Alice does not want to pay attention to the connection between sexuality
and violence in the urban African American community. When Violet asks
Alice why she does not want to hear about these women, she replies:
“Oh. The men. The nasty life. Don’t they fight all the time? When they
do your hair, you’re not afraid they might start fighting?”
“Only when they sober.” Violet smiled.
“Oh, well.”
“They share men, fight them and fight over them, too.”
“No woman should live like that.”
“No. No woman should have to” (J 84).
Women arming themselves, especially with knives, invoke the existence of the
theme in women’s classic blues of violent revenge.
Both Violet and Alice have been subject to sexual jealousy of other
women and the desire for revenge. During their exchange of thoughts Violet
remarks Alice that she ‘wasn’t born with a knife,’ asking if she had never
“picked one up” (J 85). Alice acknowledges to herself that she had been
“starving for [the] blood” of her husband’s lover: “Her craving settled on the
red liquid coursing through the other woman’s veins.” Alice’s fantasies of
satisfying this craving include a “clothesline rope circling her neck,” (J 86) an
image which radiates multiple meanings. It discloses the killing in the South
which contributed to “the wave of black people running from want and
violence” that “crested in the 1870’s; the 1880’s’ the 90’s but was a steady
stream in 1906 when Joe and Violet joined in” (J 33). Up till now it is also a
feminine-coded ‘tool,’ suggestive of the domestic realm which slavery, both
during and after, denied black women by forcing them to mother white families
instead of their own. “Both are motivated by similar economic, social and
psychological forces, it is only logical that those who sought to undermine
Blacks were also most virulent anti-feminists. The means of oppression
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differed across race and sex lines, but the wellspring of that oppression was the
same” (Giddings 6).
As Alice is waiting for one of Violet’s visit. That is no longer
frightening her denial of her culture’s history marked itself in her ponderings
on the violence in which Violet and Joe have participated:
. . . Alice Manfred knew the kind of Negro that couple
was: the kind she trained Dorcas from. The
embarrassing kind. More than unappealing, they were
dangerous. The husband shot; the wife stabbed.
Nothing. Nothing her niece did or tried could equal the
violence done to her. And where there was violence
wasn’t there also vice? Gambling. Cursing. A terrible
and nasty closeness. Red dresses. Yellow shoes. And,
of course, race music to urge them on (J 79).
Paradise (1998) is the first novel by Toni Morrison after winning the
Nobel Prize in Literature (1997). It is a part of the trilogy (Beloved, Paradise
and Jazz). It is about love. It sets in the history of African-Americans. It is
penetratingly about racism, and other troubles that African-Americans had to
face. It depicts about the love of God, and the followers. It is in addition about
farthest patriarchy. It comprises people of two communities: an all-black town
called Ruby and the women in Convent.
Paradise deals with an overachieving parent with an underachieving
child. It is very painful, difficult and complicated. The very first line: ‘They
shoot the white girl first’ shows the intensity and intention of the novel.
Therefore, critics think that it is most difficult and complicated of Morrison’s
books. The novel is higher-level math, perhaps magical realist math. The
beginning of the second paragraph of the book is, “They are nine, over twice
the number of the women they were obliged to stampede or kill and they have
the paraphernalia for either requirement . . .” (P 3). ‘They are nine.’ What
would nine be more than half of? Four. How many women are there? Five.
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Who are we missing? The narration shows disappearing women, sometimes
them being shot. Consolata is shot in the forehead. The white girl is killed.
The novelist frequently uses magical realism. That is a concept that’s
often associated with Latin American writers. There is some debate about
whether this actually applies to Morrison. It is a freeing up of notions of time
and space in what appear to be realistic events or a realistic novel/narrative.
In the novel, the community of Ruby deals with the disappearance of the
women. Roger goes out, sees no bodies, and reports there’s nobody out there.
People are confused at first and seek to come up with rational explanations.
Promptly they begin thinking about their self-interest. If there aren’t any
bodies, then we don’t have to report anything. We don’t have to bring the
police into this. If there are no bodies, our men are not criminals. Instead of a
profound mystery, it turns into a part of the luck of Ruby.
Feminism is a major theme. People kill each other in the name of
tradition, culture and slavery since the beginning of time. Morrison points out
the humanistic attitude in her feminism. Fascinatingly, Morrison asserts that
she has inspired to write this novel by an event she heard about while traveling
in Brazil. At that time, several black nuns were murdered by a group of local
Catholic men because the women were rumored to be practicing candomblé, an
Afro-Brazilian religion. That brings together aspects of Judeo-Christianity with
traditional West African beliefs. The narrative becomes to be a myth.
Although, the novelist was captivated by the idea of this assault on the
feminine, on the black, on the African, on the anti-establishment.
Morrison describes how collective groups ritualize and symbolize the
concept of community. For example, there is the oven, and all the issues around
the oven. By the time the oven is located in Ruby, it has ceased to be
functional. It has turned out to be a symbol of the community. “As in the
ancestral African tradition place is as important as the human actors. For the
land is a participant in the maintenance of folk tradition. It is one of the
necessary constants through which the folk dramatize the meaning of life, as it
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is passed on from one generation to the next. Setting then is organic to the
characters’ view of themselves. And a change in a place drastically alters the
traditional values that give their life coherence” (Bischoff 22).
The storyline seeks to explore the feminist concepts and patriarchy in
Paradise, in search of a reason for the attack. It declares that in Ruby,
patriarchy and feminist awareness are in contrast that eventually lead to the
massacre. Even though the racist matters are exceptional as well. Other than
feminist issues and the associated struggles among two opposed groups of
people give sufficient clarification for the massacre. “Each, viewing the other’s
world as impoverished and unsafe, sees it as an occasion to ‘rescue’ the other”
(Nkrumah 29). The novel is a multi-layered novel, which engages several
characters in the historical background of African American black people, who
a long ago determined to put up their own community. They did their best to
put off it from any harm. Their thought was crucially embedded on a reversed
racism, and hatred of white people.
The novel depicts a story of a community in 1990s in Oklahoma, who
built and lived in a town called Ruby. The town was near a convent, in which
some women lived together; free and playfully. Again, the story of a quarrel
between these two communities; people of Ruby and women in the convent. It
commences with a shocking opening: “they shoot the white girl first. With the
rest, they can take their time. No need to hurry out here” (P 3). Then moves
backward, more than eight years ago, and starts from the beginning of the
story; the story of Ruby and its people, as well as the story of the convent and
its residents.
The fact is that, in 1890, black people from Mississippi and Louisiana
gathered together to found a new town, called Haven. Some of them were poor
and slaves, while others were not. But they had all suffered from racism. They
attempted to build this all-black town to have a better life and future. In 1950, a
group of them, many have recently returned from World War II, moved from
Haven to build another town, to start again and triumph over their adversity.
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This is new town called Ruby. They perceive some people, and they look the
complexities. They would not seek to recognize or deal with the obstruction,
but massacre women, to put an end to the problem and start their lives again.
Another important figure in the story in a feminine length is a building
called convent. Convent is a mansion seventeen miles away from Ruby. It was
once a convent for Catholics, with schools and nuns, but turned to a mere
house. Convent women live free and peaceful together. They are away from
anything, and from patriarchal and racist ideologies. Connie is one of them who
have lived there from the time it was a convent, and other women join there
after that, in a period of eight years. “The point is that freedom is choosing
your responsibility. It is not having no responsibilities; it is choosing the ones
you want” (Naylor Gloria and Morrison 573).
Therefore, the storyline moves around the convent. It performs like the
role of the protagonist of the novel. It appears to be about Ruby, but turn to be
more about the convent. During the story and at the end, readers point out the
similarities between ‘paradise’ and the convent. Paradise is a like a thousand-
piece jigsaw puzzle, and includes about seventy names and characters.
However, the foremost characters are convent women, and a couple of Ruby
men who rule the town. They are sons of the founders of Ruby, who have the
direction of Ruby men.
Convent Women Connie is the principal character and the longtime
resident of the convent. She was nine years old when she was rescued by a nun.
She was brought to the Catholic school in the convent. “For thirty years she
offered her body and her soul to God’s Son and His Mother” (P 225). It was
prior to meeting Deacon Morgan. Once they saw each other, they fell in love.
Clandestinely and candidly, they were together till when in a love-making
scene, Connie bites Deacon’s lips and licks the blood. Deacon is acquainted
with the sexually unrestricted woman. He loves her loving action. But points
out this incident and breaks off their relationship, as he cannot face the basic
rules of Ruby. He was informed even before that about this relationship and its
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prospect. Connie lives in the mansion, where the doors are open to all men and
women, regardless of their race or color. She takes care of others and has a
maternal figure. She be familiar with how to mix herbs to make medicine, and
has also a kind of super-natural power. Even though Ruby town may regard as
her a witch, he is just helpful and maybe lucky enough to rescue others from
death. Mavis is a neglectful twenty-seven-year-old woman with a patriarchal
abusive husband, Frank. She is friendless in her life because of him. She
throttles her twin babies in their car, and flees from the house. Thinking that
her husband and the other three children are planning to kill her, she escapes.
She compels to her mother’s house. After overhearing her mother calling
Frank, she drives away again. She runs out of gas and finds the convent. Gigi is
a sensual liberated woman. Her mother is missed and her father is near death.
Mickey, her boyfriend is in jail but they have arranged a date in a town called
Wish, where there is a rock that looks like “a black man and woman fucking
forever.” (P 6) Her search to get the place is fruitless, and she ends up at the
convent. She is a sexually enchanting woman, the one who stepped in Ruby,
“in pants so tight, heels so high, [and] earrings so large” (P 63). Seneca is a
twenty years old woman. She was left alone by her mother, when she was five.
She is houseless or family. She is submissive. Before joining the convent
women, she was picked up by a wealthy woman, and lived as a prostitute for
three months. In her childhood, and after the abusive, sexual intercourses with
her foster brother, she got the habit of hurting herself, to seek other’s pity. She
yet has this masochistic habit. Pallas Truelove, sixteen years old, whose father
is a wealthy lawyer, and always busy of his job. Her mother is a painter, who
left them when she was 3 years old. Pallas lacks a kind of parental care in her
life. Her relationship with her father is so weak. As a result, she makes a
decision to run way with his boyfriend Carlos. She is willing to lead her life in
peace together. Both plan to visit her after so many years. They take pleasure in
the trip and the company, until Pallas finds her mother and Carlos making love.
She leaves shocked and drives away. Her car wrecks, assaulted by men who
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chase her into a lake and rape her. She ends up in a clinic, and then comes to
the convent.
Ruby Men Zechariah Morgan who is known as Big Papa. He was one of
the founders of Haven. Anybody retains information him, however, a few racist
and patriarchal ideas about him. Rector Morgan (Big Daddy) is Zechariah’s
son, helped his father in foundation of the town, Haven. Deacon Morgan and
Steward Morgan are the twins of Rector Morgan. They are of the leaders of
Ruby. Both like to live in and re-member their past. They cannot bear any
change to their life-styles and ideas. They are dogmatic and may die, or kill for
this. Arnold Fleetwood is one of the leaders of Ruby, too. Fleetwood family
along with Morgan family plays an important role in Ruby. They have the most
strategic positions and jobs, they belong to the founders of Ruby, and they have
the right to decide or control the town, or its people.
Reverend Richard Misner is one of the reverends in Ruby. He aims to
advise people in his sermons. He is considered an outsider in Ruby’s men point
of view. People of Ruby suppose that an outsider potentially means an enemy,
also. He talks about God and God’s grace. He is an educated man. He tries to
survive the town from its isolation. He faces the persistence of people of Ruby
and its leaders. The day Ruby men attacked and shot the convent women,
Reverend Misner was away with his girlfriend Anna Flood. He decides to
move somewhere else. Later he changes his mind, when he sees the regretful
Deacon who comes to talk. He feels that the town would need him.
A feminist reading of the novel is based on reversed racism and
patriarchal ideologies. Their history and their personal experiences of racism,
move towards an all-black town, and create a basis their hatred of white people.
It is a large amount general and severe that they even differ between dark black
and light black skins. At the end, the convent looks like more to be like the
mentioned paradise, which acknowledges and cares whoever comes forth, even
if they are “crying women, staring women, scowling, lip-biting women, or
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women just plain lost” (P 270). Their standpoint of women and feminine issue
is yet worse that racism in Ruby.
In the novel, there are two contrasts, the Convent women who have gone
through these phase, and the women in Ruby, who are going to be aware of
their social role and their personal life. Men of Ruby are anxious of their
consciousness. They make an effort to disregard women’s freedom, sexuality
and social roles. Their minds are worried with these concepts, but they are in
fear of them at the same time. Patriarchal society and the ruling men of Ruby
who defend these circumstances is just a half of the problem. The other half is
Ruby women’s mentality, which is lost in thought with men’s superiority and
patriarchal ideologies. Kristeva deems that women are blameworthy and guilty
for their passiveness. According to McAfee, she endorses the fact that women
held back themselves. They are now and again willing to be addressed
patriarchally. In Ruby, women are passive and never think of their state of
affairs. They perceive the contrast at the convent, but not at all seek to ask for
their rights in Ruby. They admit, whatever comes from their husbands or their
fathers. It is clear that they will be side tracked if they ask any questions, but
they never even try to insist.
Feminist reading manifests that Ruby is established on some anti-
feminist issues. It brings about their sharp contrast with the convent women.
The contrast is clear, but initially Ruby residents cannot perceive. When time
moves, they just undergo the strange disparities between themselves and the
convent women. They can notice some uncertainties in the eyes of Ruby
people, by and large the new generation of Ruby teenagers. Ruling men of
Ruby make a decision to get rid of everything, to conceal their fault, and the
flaw of their traditional beliefs. They do such a massacre to continue their
supremacy, as well as their pride and happiness.
The narrative puts forth the feminist inclinations as inferiority and
superiority, the question of power, dependency and freedom, and the role of
religion, and discusses them in both communities of Ruby and the convent
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women. This reveals the differences, and the standing point of each community
toward women, and social fact to women. In Ruby, women are treated as
inferior. Their responsibility is limited to cook and please their husbands in
bed. Even they do not make complaint about it. The society has turned them as
submissive.
These women cannot divorce from their past. This fact is well known to
the rulers. The men also are conscious us that they will lose their statue, the
leadership when will realize the fact. The convent women have suffered from
the same patriarchy as well. They are more often than not run away from their
past lives, and started a new life at the convent. Mavis’ past life is full with fear
of pleasing a husband who is so ignorant that he is never pleased. The most
private moment of their relationship, which should be equally pleasant and
enjoyable, would only bring this question to her mind that, whether their sex
would “be quick like most always or long, wandering, collapsing in wordless
fatigue?” (P 26). And she gets that “it was neither. [As] he didn’t penetrate –
just rubbed himself to climax while chewing a clump of her hair through the
nightgown that covered her face” (P 26). This takes place in reality, while
Mavis experiences not good.
In the patriarchal relationship, there is no emotion, no caring or loving
even between a husband and wife. Sex is a prime duty, which she should offer,
even if she is not involved in it. Mavis and other women run away to the
convent to seek the freedom, love, peace, parental care and attention. They get
away from a traditional patriarchal society to find themselves. They are all free
in the convent. They accept anyone, black or white, man or woman, and would
help each other to lead the life in peace. They are even free to leave. The
convent women make a decision to live their lives there. They are not
responsible of their ‘husbands’ or ‘boyfriends’ pleasure, neither for patriarchal
morality of the whole male-dominated society.
In Ruby, women are subdued. Nobody talks about women rights and
their opinion. But about Ruby, men of Ruby, their past and patriarchy. Even
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when Deacon Morgan talks to his wife about the town and its problems, it is
not in a consulting or even informing manner. He just says something, for his
own sake. If she says “I don’t understand,” his reaction is repressive and
patriarchal: “‘I do’. He smile[s] up at her ‘You don’t need to [understand]’” (P
107). Gigi, like other women in the convent, commits to memory that her past
life, before coming to the convent, was the same. “Neither a high school, nor a
college student, no one, not even the other girls took her seriousness seriously”
(P 257). It gives the impression that the women in convent runaway from their
past lives, in search of their paradise, their heaven. And when they enter to the
convent, they experience something gifted there. Pallas thought that, “The
whole house felt permeated with a blessed malelessness, like a protected
domain, free of hunters but exciting too. As though, she might meet herself
here; an unbridled, authentic self, but which she thought of as a ‘cool’ self” (P
177). Another sign to the inferiority and weakness of women, as the people of
Ruby consider, would be the name of their town. They have once named their
town Ruby, to immortalize Ruby Morgan, sister of Deacon and Steward, who
died because of white people’s racism. They declined to believe the black
patient and sent for a veterinarian, she died in the meantime. And now, this
name can associate the idea of safeguard in Ruby. Ruby men should guard the
Ruby, and it may in a straight line indicate their town, or in some way the
women in their town. Their two issues are the main factors of men in Ruby.
In a male dominated society, a man is courteous due to his power. He
would be a woman, if there is no power. Apart from this, women are far away
from power. They cannot act or decide. They cannot think or speak by their
own. Patriarchal society keeps the right to speak for men. Society can make the
blind eyes to their existence and their identity. In Ruby, men make a decision
for women. They have even the power to pay no attention to or accept people.
They can make Menus Jury “return the woman he brought home to marry; the
pretty sandy-haired girl from Virginia.” (P 195).Or when, Jeff is asked about
her daughter’s attendance in college, he says without any hesitation, that “I’m
her father. I’ll arrange her mind” (P 61). The main issue of the ruling powers
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in Ruby, who are ill-treated by racism, is to segregate and save from harm
women. It is very difficult to distinguish between these two, or set a priority
between them. In Ruby, protection has in point of fact the same meaning as
control. Despite the women in Ruby, the convent women have the power. They
can think freely and seriously for themselves. They can live alone and do what
they want. At this juncture the question is that, “whose power is stronger?” (P
276).
Women are scarified in order to inform the people of Ruby. Even the
new generation, about the power of tradition, to terrify them to do as you are
told their rulers, tradition and patriarchy. Ruby is centered upon a patriarchal
ideology. Women in the convent, on other hand, are all free of their past, this
history. They have once escaped from it, and would never come back again.
Ruby rules state that “they don’t need men,” (P 276). But they all are familiar
with that they don’t require patriarchy. The door of convent is open to all
people, without any restrictions. But patriarchy becomes Ruby’s history. As a
result they frighten and may do anything. This is taken as a part of their rights.
If it is not that Ruby is reliant on some of their products, like medicine and
herbs, pepper and hot spices, women in convent are free and they can live their
own life. In Ruby no woman drives, they have a Cadillac and can drive
anywhere. This car is a characteristic of freedom for the convent women, which
brings almost all of the women to the convent. The convent women have their
own business. And they have done all of these things without men. Therefore,
Ruby men believe of them as witches.
The circumstances are different in patriarchal town of Ruby. Women are
always connected to their fathers or their husbands. No one can live or survive
alone without men. Reviewing the family trees in Ruby, Patricia finds some
last names, without any other references, of “women whose identity rested on
the men they married – if marriage applied” (P 187). If not, they have no name
for themselves. Patricia, who and educated woman in Ruby, acting as a teacher
and historian as well, looks like to be free by her own. She is acquainted with
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approximately all about men of Ruby. She discerns about their past and history.
She is willing to keep these records for next generation and put in black and
white for them as the story of Ruby. But she is still in leap of Ruby men. She is
psychologically strained to destroy by fire her papers and all the documents. In
the convent, women are free and independent. The first thing they come across
is the individualism, free of social patriarchy. They meet themselves, alone,
and for the first time they find the opportunity to discover and quest with this
self. Moving from this stage, they can walk their life by their own. In Ruby,
people describe them strong women, for the reason that they, Ruby people,
have no self-confidence or power by themselves.
The elder generation has never experienced the individualism, and can
never accept that. They have fought in World War IInd, and they have built a
town. But all of their actions belong to the whole town, to the whole black
people of Ruby. There is nothing individual in that community. They cannot
think losing the power, the control of the town, and the control over its people.
Religion plays key role regarding women. Patriarchal interpretation of
religion may propose the loneliness and suppression of women. In Ruby one of
the Reverends is an enlightened man, but the other one and the function of
church is for all time to hold patriarchy of Ruby people. It gives the impression
that it is incapable to transform anything. This is an instrument in the hands of
leaders to restrain women and make them submissive. Reverend Misner, who
attempts his best to alert people of their secluded condition, and discourses of
God’s love. In the entire novel, he cannot change a person, or bring a better
situation.
In contrast, in the convent, women have their own big kitchen, forever
full of food and drink. They don’t want an oven. They require no church or
reverend to preach them or confine them. They live in a house which was
previously belonged to the nuns, and was a Christian school for Native
Americans. Currently they live there in peace by their own. Ruby men cannot
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imagine it, they perceive it as if “they don’t need God,” (P 276) or believe that
they are witches geared up to destruction.
In fact, patriarchy is the soul of Ruby. The deep-seated underlying
structure of the town is based on a traditional and patriarchal ideology. There is
no scope for women. Initially they were blind, later they realize their
neighborhood. Even the Ruby rulers cannot tolerate the convent and the women
in it, who live free of patriarchy and are triumphant and unbeaten. They
frightened the Convent women; therefore they cannot face the awareness of
women in Ruby. They also think that Ruby women presence may lead them to
a revolt against tradition and patriarchy. Men of Ruby are fearful of losing their
stature, the power and the control over people. Their patriarchy averts them
from considerate their neighbors. They are controlled by several traditional
creeds. This is the “helplessness” that makes them “want to shoot somebody,”
(P 96) as Steward declares in the novel.
The writer embarks on a complete reconsideration of normative
Christian theology through the inclusion and integration of Gnostic scripture.
The storyline portrays the all-black town, Ruby, whose citizens are proud,
confident, and self-sufficient. They equate with racial purity. They are a
community of African Americans isolated from the white world. However,
purity and isolation happen to the justification for the violence they enact on
five women living in a nearby ‘Convent.’ Through her portrayal of Ruby and
its men, the novelist confronts separatist ideologies that romanticize
communities based on isolation and exclusion. Morrison takes effort to create
new myths that could afford the base for social change.
The novel is about the relationship between two communities, the town
of Ruby, Oklahoma, and a very small but largely self-sufficient group of
women who live in what has come to be known as the Convent, located on the
outskirts of Ruby. The people of Ruby were once replete with a common idea.
Of course, they trusted, needed, and relied upon each other. Now the town feels
threatened, and in their anxiety to find some kind of solution. The town people
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blame and attack the women in the Convent. The women become easily victim
for all the unresolved emotions pent up in the prominent men of Ruby, who
have felt powerless to halt the unraveling of their homes.
The novel has interwoven portraits. They are not just portraits of people,
places, or of periods of time. But they are portraits of determined and conflict.
The portraits rest on all of the things that are done to save from harm what has
been worked for and sacrificed for, to remain the town safe from the power of
destruction.
The relationship between Ruby and The Convent is brought forth by
tension and mistrust. The men and some of the women in Ruby look down on
what they suppose takes place at the Convent. Satirically, none of the men have
actually been inside the Convent before the day of the raid. On the other hand,
they have preconceived ideas about the Convent that cause them to abuse and
mistrust the women who live there. They are puzzled by the bond that these
women seem to have with each other, and the effect their power is having on
the town of Ruby. The male citizens of Ruby start to feel endangered by the
presence of Ruby women. The supposed threat is at the bottom on nothing
more than fear of the mysterious. To the women in the Convent, Ruby stands
for the patriarchal society that they are running away. They have no wish to be
a part of the town, just as the town looks for to keep them.
The novel begins on the significant date of July 1976 as nine men from
Ruby prepare to kill five women who live in the nearby Convent. The Morgan
twins, Deacon and Steward, personify unified authority. They contribute to one
memory, one purpose, and one belief until the murders that July day divide
them. They take to mean the words inscribed on the sacred Oven as per their
privileged relationship to the originator of the inscription: “The twins believed
it was when he discovered how narrow the path of righteousness could be that
their grandfather chose the words for the Oven’s lip.” (P 14). The author makes
profusely clear the dangers of both narrow interpretations and a belief in one’s
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own righteousness as the men stalk the unarmed women. The description of the
women at the end of the first chapter clarifies the irony of the men’s actions.
The novel seeds of feminism in Ruth’s relationship with Macon, the
opportunities obtainable to First Corinthians and Magdalene, Lena’s criticism
of Milkman and the privilege that accompanies his “hog’s gut,” (P 215) and
Hagar’s relationship with Milkman.
Morrison puts the reader into the unstable juxtaposition of race and
gender in the novel. She establishes a method of revelation that is best grasped
as a vision of the many layers of history, ideology and desire. In numerous
ways, her literary endeavor has acted as a bridge between Black writing and the
American literature. She also throws light on the Black migration under the veil
of feminism. The forced migration of enslaved peoples from Africa to the
Americas during the slave trade and also voluntary migration in terms of
escapes from slavery. The huge mass of people who moved from the South to
northern cities during the Great Migration. In the Foreword to Song of
Solomon, Morrison casts light on a lot about migration.
In the novel, when Pilate takes the knife. She holds it to the man’s heart
after he’s beaten up Reba. There’s talk about women being weak and foolish:
“Women are foolish, you know, and mamas are the most foolish of all….
Mamas get hurt and nervous when somebody don’t like they children…. We do
the best we can, but we ain’t go the strength you men got. That’s why it makes
us so sad if a grown man start beating up on one of us” (P 94). Pilate strikes the
shielding love of parents for children, particularly mothers for children.
However, the novel also portrays strong bonds between fathers and children,
such as the existences that persist to haunt both Ruth’s and Pilate’s lives. Note
all of these varied patterns. Does love mean related to someone? When Hagar
falls apart, Guitar informs her that love is not holding someone. Love does not
connote belonging to someone. “It’s a bad word, ‘belong,’” (P 305). Love does
not mean that you fall apart when the person leaves you.
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Sula is the principal character in the novel Sula. She is independent girl.
She goes off on her own. She doesn’t take care what other people think about
her. She can just walk away as per her own norms. She is willing to take on
people. Of course, she is ready to encounter with a group of boys. She is the
typical creation of Morrison. Sula is always ready to challenge the gender
notions. She’s already challenging what we might call gender essentialism. In
fact gender essentialisms a particular kind of way and men have to be a
particular kind of way.
Undoubtedly, Morrison is one of the gifted writers. The opening
paragraph of Sula manifests everything:
In that place, where they tore the night shade and
blackberry patches from those roots to make room for
the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a
neighborhood. It stood in the hills above the valley
town of Medallion and spread all the way to the river.
It is called the suburbs now, but when black people
lived there it was called the Bottom. One road, shaded
by beeches, oaks, maples, and chestnuts, connected it
to the valley. The beeches are gone now and so are the
pear trees where children sat and yelled down through
the blossoms to passersby. Generous funds have been
allotted to level the stripped and faded buildings that
clutter the road from Medallion up to the golf course.
They’re going to raze the Time and a Half Pool Hall,
where feet in long tan shoes once pointed down from
chair rungs. A steel ball will knock to dust Irene’s
Palace of Cosmetology, where women used to lean
their heads back on sink trays and doze while Irene
lathered Nu Nile into their hair. Men in khaki work
clothes will pry loose the slats of Reba’s Grill, where
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the owner cooked in her hat because she couldn’t
remember the ingredients without it (S 3).
As a matter of fact, it’s a story looks like very simple and easily structured. The
chapter titles are years, basically, the years between the first and second world
wars. They’re designated. Rather comes about in each of those chapters that are
related with that date.
In the novel Sula, in which the character of Sula doesn’t come into sight
for about forty pages. The readers get a score of other stories and in due course
the readers get around to the title character. It’s very obvious that the stories in
the early chapters are in any obscurely connected to the character of Sula. Nel
is connected to Sula. However, the story that is told before we meet to the
character Sula is not in any way in a straight line related to the character Sula
herself. “Yet Sula and Nel are very much alike. They complement each other.
They support each other. I suppose the two of them together could have made a
wonderful single human being” (Parker 253).
This is a novel about the relationship between the community and the
individual against the backdrop of feminism. Paradise operates by a course of
exclusion and careful inclusion, although what happens in Sula is that
approximately anybody can be included. That’s one of the characteristics of
these early chapters.
Perhaps, this is one of the novels in which the writer constructs extreme
characterization. In Paradise the novelist succeeds to create extreme situations,
other than she doesn’t essentially form extreme characters. At this juncture we
have extreme characters: a man, who has gone through the World War I, is
fearful of his own hands. He doesn’t quite unfamiliar with what to do with the
face he sees in the toilet, and creates National Suicide Day. There is also a
woman who it seems that has her own leg cut off because to save her children
and then sets herself up as a type of queen. She afterward sets her own son on
fire. Her daughter will have sexual intercourse with any man but won’t sleep
with them consequently sleeping entails trust. She gets a little loving every day
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in the pantry and nobody minds. At that moment she ends up getting set on fire
and burnt to death on top of the fire.
Eva turns out to be a part of the life of the community with her
completely weird house that has several rooms that are all doors and some
rooms that have no doors. She sits up on the third floor and all the men come to
her like a queen. Hannah is element of the community. In due course, the
women come to have no problem with Hannah’s sexual behavior, for the
reason that they perceive it as a mark of respect. She respects their men. Helene
believes she is black Creole however most likely isn’t. She’s from New
Orleans. One and all turns her into Helen as a way of putting together her into
the community. Everybody can be put up in a number of ways without giving
up their strangeness and their authentic character.
The novel is about the relationship between community and the
individual in part. The relationship between Sula and Nel is the story that
people in all probability like best in this book. These very different young
women are fast friends. Sula loves the order of Helene’s house, and Nel loves
the liveliness of Eva’s house. They obtain what they want from each other.
They are not friends since they are alike. They are friends because they’re
balancing. They give each other a form and figure.
Sula and Ajax are friends. They are people who appreciate each other.
One of the things that is frequently unnoticed with Ajax is that his relationship
to his mother. His mother was an influential personality in his life. He gains
knowledge of the worth of free will and identity from his mother. There are
two things with the relationship between Sula and Ajax. One is by glancing at
Ajax and uttering when Sula begins constructing this nest for him he desires to
get away from it. He couldn’t deal with it. It’s moreover detaining. It’s too
preventive. Sula has done is to fall into the trap of conventional gender roles.
Sula supposes she needs at that moment is somewhat that is absolutely secure,
incredible that is normal. Of course, something like what Nel has.
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Sula’s fault is that at several levels what she wishes is to make one Ajax.
Ajax doesn’t require it and neither does Sula. It’s the model that’s there. She is
ready to give and take her sense of self in order to move toward that. He puts,
‘No.’ One of the things that show that for us is when she distinguishes his
driver's license after he’s gone. She’s misnamed him all along. She thought he
was Ajax when he was A. Jacks. Apart from this, she was turning him into all-
powerful male. That’s not what he was. He was A. Jacks. The friendship
between Ajax and Sula moves forward to talk about the relationship between
freedom and responsibility. It’s a typical set of oppositions. In other words,
Sula equals free will; Nel equals accountability.
Sula has more interesting life. She is the one who has seen the larger
world. She is conscious of things that Nel can never know. However, Sula is
alone. “So when they met, first in those chocolate halls and next through the
ropes of the swing, they felt the ease and comfort of old friends. 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” (S 52).
Sula is typical of all those students who goes to college and then come
home and nobody quite knows what to do with them. They don’t moderately
equal any longer. They don’t think like their families. They don’t fit with their
friends. They just don’t quite fit.
Eva is the woman who speaks that she has to kill Plum, because what he
is attempting to do is come back to her womb. She experiences she has a right
to wipe out him, because, in spite of everything, she brought him into the world
and saved his life. At this time he has discarded that life. She takes him out of
the world. Subsequently, in what might be inferred as a sort of justice, Eva has
to sit and watch as Hannah burns up. Because she doesn’t have her leg, which
she gave up for her children, she cannot save her daughter.
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Shadrack, the man who notices the face of his fellow soldier blown off
as he’s running and the body keeps running. He has to eat on plates that keep
the food cautiously separated. When Sula calls his shack for the only time,
what hits her is not that it’s a shack but that it’s exceedingly neat. It’s as neat as
Helene’s house. Shadrack loves order. He loves order; as a result he’s seen
disorder. Plum is the victim of war. He’s a man who goes backward in his life
because he can’t deal with the world as it is. Jude seems to feel that the world is
at war against him personally until Sula, in a wonderful act of signifying, says,
“What are you talking about? The whole world loves black men.” She laughs:
“[White men] spend so much time worrying about your penis they forget their
own. […. White women] chase you all to every corner of the earth, feel for you
under every bed [….] Colored women worry themselves into bad health just
trying to hang on to your cuffs. [….] And if that ain’t enough, […] Nothing in
this world loves a black man more than another black man. [….] So. It looks to
me like you the envy of the world” (S 103-04).
In the novel, Morrison actually describes acts of sex. She uses language
about sex. She makes broad observations about sex—that Hannah wanted to be
touched every day and that it took place in the pantry. Then she turns it into
this little joke about not sleeping with anyone. We require thinking that. We in
addition want to believe Sula’s defense and whether we ought to take Sula’s
defense acutely. People dismiss it out of hand. Sula says nobody owns anybody
else. ‘You don’t own Jude; he doesn’t own you.’ She posits that we are all free
agents. If we don’t believe of people as property, then it lifts all kinds of
queries about how we illustrate human relationships. The only thing commonly
associated in the novel; with women are domestic household work in spite of
the changing tides in the working place.
The characters like Eva, Helene, Sula and Hannah stand for the
matriarchal authorities women, emasculating the male characters. Women
oblige the action in the narrative and give their substance in the family. They
give their significance in the Black community and their existence in uniting it
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collectively. Sula in addition sets up the closeness and interdependence of the
community with its members. Each member provides the community a positive
zest, an excitement that is vital to give it flavor. All the characters in Sula,
including Shadrack, and the Deweys, give significance to the individual in the
community.
Morrison published Tar Baby in 1981. In the foreword to Tar Baby,
Morrison remembers the significance of storytelling in her childhood. She grew
up listening to the adults in her family entertain one another with tales. She
developed the desire to spin yarns as well. Morrison eventually dedicated Tar
Baby to the many women at whose feet she first learned both to listen and to
tell stories, including her mother and grandmothers. The novel itself
reinterprets a folktale that almost certainly originated in Ghana however, which
became exceptionally American through retellings on Southern plantations. It
deals with aspects of a distinctly African American experience. She puts in the
black vernacular, borrowing phrases and figures of speech unique to the
community in which she was raised. Her work obtains ideas and cadences from
the blues, jazz, gospel, and spirituals to walk around such issues as the
inheritance of slavery.
The novel touches the current feminist movements. Particularly, her two
characters touch this sensitive issue delicately. With the help of patron
Valerian Street, Jadine Childs has assimilated into the white world as an
educated fashion model. Son, in contrast, was raised in an all-black community
in rural Florida. Much of the novel’s dramatic tension originates from the
power struggles between these two vastly different characters.
Morrison’s interest in feminism is evident in her creation of an active
workshop at Princeton University, the Princeton Atelier, which promotes
collaborations across the arts, and her active participation with Oprah’s Book
Club. Her diverse accomplishments have secured her an enduring place in
literary history. The novelist narrates the story realistically and interestingly.
Soon before Christmas, an unknown sailor jumps overboard and swims toward
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the harbor of Queen of France in the middle of the night. He is unable to reach
shore, therefore, he climbs aboard a small yacht and stows away. When the
yacht lands, he lands on a small island called Isle des Chevaliers, and he puts
out of sight again, this time at a house called L’Arbe de la Croix. Valerian
Street and his wife, Margaret, live in the house, along with their servants,
Ondine and Sydney. Jadine Childs, the niece of Ondine and Sydney, has come
to visit. Before coming back to the island, she studied at the Sorbonne, an
education for which Valerian paid, and employed as a model in Paris.
Margaret and Valerian come to blows because Margaret has invited a
number of guests to come stay, against Valerian’s wishes. One of these guests
is the Streets’ son, Michael, but Valerian suspicious that he will really come.
After a mostly ferocious dispute at dinner one night, Margaret goes to her
room, but she quickly returns to the dining room earsplitting. Sydney runs to
Margaret’s room and returns to declare that there is a man hiding in her closet.
Everyone but Valerian is terrified. Valerian invites the man, whose name is
Son, to stay the night.
The next morning, Margaret, who is enormously disappointed with
Valerian. She locks herself in her room. Meanwhile Jadine’s rich, white
boyfriend, Ryk, has sent her a luxurious sealskin coat. Son shows up in her
room as she tries on the coat, and they talk in an enticing way that sooner or
later starts to terrify Jadine. After Son makes some sexually crude remarks,
Jadine threatens to report him to Valerian, after which she goes to find
Valerian.
As another servant, Thérèse, does laundry, she thinks about Son, who
had been in the house for several days earlier to his detection and whom
Thérèse had been nourishing. With Jadine gone to find Valerian, Son showers
in her bathroom. When he is clean, he looks much smarter. He finds Valerian
before Jadine does, and he electrifies Valerian with his comprehension of
gardening and his sense of humor. Valerian informs Sydney to assist Son get
new clothes, and Gideon, another servant, and Thérèse take him shopping in a
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town near L’Arbe de la Croix. When Jadine sees the cleaned-up Son, she
comes to a decision not to tell Valerian about his behavior in her bedroom. As a
substitute, she requests Son on a picnic at the beach, and they share their time
and views. Despite their differences, they appear to unite on some level. On the
way back from the picnic, their car runs out of gas, and Son leaves to retrieve
gas from a pump at the pier. While Jadine remains, she makes her mind up to
seek shelter from the sun and abandons the car. On her way to some nearby
trees, she gets stuck in a flood but control to escape. Ondine is upset that Jadine
and Son appear to be getting closer; however, she does not interfere.
Michael fails to show up, and the other guests get delayed because of
bad weather when Christmas arrives. Margaret’s spirits sink, and she discards
her intricate cooking projects and leaves Ondine to end them. Valerian upsets
Ondine, Sydney, and Son when he announces that he fired Gideon and Thérèse
for stealing apples. A heated argument breaks out at Christmas dinner. At the
end of it, Ondine discloses that Margaret ill-treated Michael when he was a
boy. Valerian goes into shock, and Son and Jadine leave the table and go to bed
together.
Almost immediately, Jadine and Son leave the island. They go to New
York. They become carefree time as lovers. They live in a borrowed apartment,
and neither of them has a permanent job, but they don’t seem to care very much
about money. In the meantime, back on the island, things are much more
subdued, and Valerian declines to let Margaret gives details her actions to him.
Ondine and Sydney are anxious that they will be fired.
Jadine and Son visit his hometown of Eloe, Florida when spring arrives.
The trip is a disaster for their relationship, because Jadine hates Eloe, and Son
loves it. Here much dissimilarity between Jadine and Son come to the surface.
Their divisions tear them apart when they end up back in New York. They
clash frequently. Above all violent confrontation, Jadine leaves Son and New
York behind. She is determined to return to Paris, but first she stops at Isle des
Chevaliers to retrieve her sealskin coat. Ondine is upset that Jadine gives the
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impression to care more about the coat than about either Ondine or Sydney, but
her annoyance does not hold Jadine. Eventually she heads to Paris, telling
Ondine and Sydney not to tell Son where she has gone. Before long after she
quits, Son arrives in Queen of France, and Thérèse agrees to take him to Isle
des Chevaliers by boat, so he can look for Jadine. But instead of piloting him to
L’Arbe de la Croix as she had promised, Thérèse leaves Son on a foggy part of
the island, and she suggests that he still has a choice. He can either keep
searching for Jadine, or he can join the race of wild horsemen on the island,
descendants of the first slaves brought there. The island opens to provide
accommodation Son as he joins the horsemen.
In this narrative, it is clear that how a feminist perspective works. As a
result this novel explores the problems that arise when women consider that
they are the stereotypes permeating literature. She puts in action similar
techniques that undermine and deconstruct the stereotypical roles of men and
women.
The Bluest Eye is about gender specific. Morrison focused on
community, both for its intimacy and its support network. It is also the
disturbance caused by people who seek out and speak the unspeakable. She
mentions the anxiety. She talks extensively about African American culture are
the songs, myths, stories, oral histories, and riddles. She laments the loss of
these traditions.
Her major focus is on gender therefore gender identity, gender roles, and
sexuality play important role. While discussing gender, some people focus only
on women, but the writer is conscious to discuss how men and women are
shaped by family, communities, and the larger society. “First and foremost it
serves as a synopsis of the tale that is to follow revealing the psychic confusion
of the novel. It also serves as an ironic comment on a society which educates
and unconsciously socializes its children like Pecola with callous regard for the
culture richness and diversity of its people” (Phyllis 124). She examines the
history of African American migration throughout her fictional world.
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It had occurred to Pecola sometime ago that if her
eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the
rights – if those eyes of hers were different, that is to
say, beautiful she herself would be different. Each
night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently
for a year she had prayed. (BE 34)
Morrison sets her novel in the middle of the century.
The top part of Blue’s text reads: “Appearance and money determine
how much power I can really possess. And so I use these values in movies,
magazines, newspapers, music, and television as mirrors to learn about me, my
story, and my culture. What I am learning about is the power of a culture’s
persuasive mass-media techniques and, conversely, the power and ability of
people to challenge that authority” (BE 26). Blue tries to reveal how the media
shapes our ideas of who we are and how we healthy in.
The white couple is very bright, while the photo of the black couple is
very dark in photo. Here she brings an attention towards the lighting. In
looking at gender and how gender roles are enforced, in the picture of the white
couple the man is prevailing in his physical posture, from his holding of the
woman, down to the visibility of his facial appearance—he’s totally uncovered.
In the other picture there is a symbolic scoring through of the black man’s face
and identity.
The novel comes forward as first contemporary female bildungsroman,
or coming-of-age narratives. Later it has become a classroom staple. It has
flourished from a number of perspectives. It succeeds to focus on the novel’s
ability to replicate African American vernacular patterns and musical rhythms.
Many critics think that the novel is the rise of African American writers,
assigning significance to their revision of American history with their own
cultural materials and folk traditions. But the other side is it alludes to earlier
black writings in order to communicate the traditionally silenced female point
of view and utilizes conventional grotesque imagery as an instrument for social
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protest. It also attracts the attention to its deconstruction of ‘whiteness’ along
racial, gender, and economic lines, while feminists have equated the violence
of the narrative with self-hatred wrought by a wide range of illusions about
white American society and African American women’s place in it.
The existence of a feminist movement was an essential to Morrison.
There is no political movement to provide muscle to those who desire to
scrutinize Black women’s experience through understanding their history,
literature, and culture. There is no political charisma that asks a least rank of
consciousness and respect from those who write or talk about our lives. In
conclusion, there is not a developed body of Black feminist political theory
whose hypotheses could be used in the study of Black women’s art. When
Black women’s books are dealt with at all, it is usually in the context of Black
literature, which basically pays no attention to the propositions of sexual
politics. When white women go through Black women’s writings they are of
course badly equipped to deal with the intricacies of racial politics. “Just as
male was universal but female was limited, white was universal but black was
limited” (Steinem 7).
A Black feminist approach to literature that represents the awareness
that the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are fatefully
knitting aspects in the works of Black women writers is an unconditional
stipulation. Until a Black feminist criticism exists the readers will not yet be
familiar with what these writers stand for. The credentials from several of
critics which track attest that without a Black feminist critical perspective not
only are books by Black women misinterpreted, they are shattered and ruined
in the process.
Blackness and feminism are to her mind mutually exclusive and
peripheral to the act of writing fiction. Morrison is gifted writer to present
marvelous record of the black side of provincial American life, who are
neglected. As a result, she comes to forward as serious black woman writer. A
remark by Alice Walker capsulizes what all the preceding examples indicate
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about the position of Black women writers and the reasons for the damaging
criticism about them.
There are two reasons why the black woman writer is not taken as
seriously as the black male writer. One is that she is a woman. Critics seem
unusually ill-equipped to intelligently discuss and analyze the works of black
women. Normally, they do not yet make the effort; they desire, rather, to talk
about the lives of black women writers, not about what they write. And, since
black women writers are not, it would seem-very likable-until recently they
were the least willing worshippers of male supremacy, comments about them
tend to be cruel.
Some critics find the seed of Black feminist approach. But the novel
explores both sexual and racial politics and Black and female identities are
inextricable elements in Black women’s writings. Here the expectation of the
novelist is Black women writers constitute an identifiable literary tradition. She
desires strongly that these writers must express forcefully of their indigenous
voice without any hesitation. The way, for example, that Zora Neale Hurston,
Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker integrate the traditional
Black female activities of root working, herbal medicine, conjure, and
midwifery into the structure of their narrations is not mere accident, but they do
deliberately.
The use of Black women’s language and cultural experience in their
literary world by Black women about Black women outcomes in a
astonishingly rich uniting of form and content and also takes their writing far
beyond the confines of white/male literary structures. The Black feminist critic
would find innumerable common qualities in works by Black women.
Morrison writes:
... for it was in dreams that the two girls had met. Long
before Edna Finch's Mellow House opened, even
before they marched through the chocolate halls of
Garfield Primary School . . . they had already made
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each other’s acquaintance in the delirium of their noon
dreams. They were solitary little girls whose loneliness
was so profound it intoxicated them and sent them
stumbling into Technicolor visions that always
included a presence, a someone who, quite like the
dreamer, shared the delight of the dream. When Nel,
an only child, sat on the steps of her back porch
surrounded by the high silence of her mother’s
incredibly orderly house, feeling the neatness pointing
at her back, she studied the poplars and fell easily into
a picture of herself lying on a flower bed, tangled in
her own hair waiting for some fiery prince. He
approached but never quite arrived. But always,
watching the dream along with her, were some smiling
sympathetic eyes. Someone as interested as she herself
in the flow of her imagined hair, the thickness of the
mattress of flowers, the voile sleeves that closed below
her elbows in gold-threaded cuffs. Similarly, Sula,
also an only child, but wedged into a household of
throbbing disorder constantly awry with things,
people, voices and the slamming of doors, spent hours
in the attic behind a roll of linoleum galloping through
her own mind on a gray-and-white horse tasting sugar
and smelling roses in full view of someone who shared
both the taste and the speed. So when they met, first in
those chocolate halls and next through the ropes of the
swing, they felt the ease and comfort of old friends.
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
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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 (BE 51-52).
As this passage manifests, their relationship, from the very beginning, is
covered with an erotic romanticism. The dreams in which they are at the outset
drawn to each other are actually harmonizing aspects of the same sensuous
fairy tale. Nel imagines a ‘fiery prince’ who never quite arrives while Sula
gallops like a prince ‘on a gray-and-white borse.’ The ‘real world’ of patriarchy
requires, however, that they channel this energy away from each other to the
opposite sex.
In the novel, the readers find the influence of environment on the
characters. But the writer’s achievement lies in the portrayal of female
characters and free and open descriptions of intracranial racism in the African
American community. Subsequently, it makes an impact to the emotional
precocity of prepucent girls.
Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other
times they take strident leaps, and all of it is
punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter [….] We do
not, cannot, know the meanings of all their words, for
we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces,
their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre
(BE 15).
The idea of listening for ‘truth in timbre’ and attempting to go through all of
these signs that they don’t unavoidably have direct access to is significant.
There are several illustrations in the novel where there are minor
misinterpretations of what is going on; for example, the whole thing with
Pecola’s first menstruation: Pecola asks “Am I going to die?” (BE 28). And
Claudia wonders whether her mother is going to drown the bleeding girl. It’s
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very humorous but also speaks to their inability to completely see and
understand.
If anybody considers feminism is about independence and resistance to
unjust authority, all her novels are feminist. If anybody thinks, feminism is
about group consciousness, asserting female solidarity in the face of male
tyranny, then the novels’ advocacy of mutual respect. Perhaps, most women’s
novels avoid radical feminist plots for the reason of their readers, who were
young, white, and middle class.
Consequently, feminist scholarship has an approved and established
political dimension. While the assurance to feminist politics and organized
feminist movements will not be equally strained in all pieces of scholarship.
The political goal of feminist work is larger than basically a stronger stress on
women. Of course, it is an important part of it. “The first class-oppression
coincides with that of female sex by the male” (Engels 69).
The order of importance in American society was clearly mapped out
during the times of slavery. First came white males, next white women, then
black males, and finally black women. Both white and black women faced the
struggle of feminism. On the other hand, nothing can measure up to the
conduct African American women faced from not only white males, but black
males as well. They positioned on the bottom step of society's social ranking.
They most of the times lived extremely hard lives. They had to suffer the same
harsh and unbearable treatment from black men, as they would white. Physical
abuse, emotional abuse, and sexual assault were all the elements of the
everyday lives of African American women during the age of slavery. “There
are no women; there are only dependent and exploited classes in which women
make one” (Stead 205).
The Bluest Eye presents the tragic story of Pecola Breedlove, a poverty-
stricken black child. Pocola longs for the blue eyes and blond hair that are
prized by the society in which she lives. The novel is considered among her
best known novels. Substantiated by the supremacy displayed by light-skinned
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black characters in the novel—as well as the self-loathing of those, like Pecola,
whose dark skin and African characteristics score them as unsightly and
unlovable. The narrative discovers black acceptance of white standards of
female beauty. “A woman whose occupation is to spin participates in the
whirling movement of creation. She who has chosen herself, who defines her
Self, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified
is a Spinster, a whirling dervish, spinning in a new time/space” (Daly 3).
Morrison published Sula, a novel chronicling the lives of two women in
1973. One woman believes in a traditional role in the community; the other
leaves her hometown, returning merely to refuse to accept conventional female
roles and to affirm her own standards and free will. Song of Solomon (1977)
puts together the strains experienced by black families that experiences forced
to incorporate into mainstream culture with their reluctance to desert a typical
African American heritage. Here the writer integrates mythical and
supernatural aspects into the novel’s narrative as a way for characters to go
beyond their everyday lives. Tar Baby, published in 1981 and set in the
Caribbean, over again make use of myth and ghostly presences to diminish the
harshness of lives in which all relationships are adversarial—above all in
cultures where blacks are opposed to whites and women are opposed to men. In
1987 Morrison published Beloved, a novel based on the realistic story of a
slave who killed her child to save it from a life of slavery; the book won the
Pulitzer Prize. Jazz (1992) characterizes dual narratives: of course, one set
during Reconstruction, the other during the Jazz Age. The novel walks around
the lasting effects of slavery and oppression on successive generations of
African Americans. Morrison’s most recent novels are Paradise (1998),
featuring the lives of nine black families who settle a tiny farming community
in Oklahoma in the 1940s, and Love (2003) is a story that depicts the owner of
a once-popular East Coast seaside resort for African Americans.
The Bluest Eye received a remarkable attention for a first novel. Sula
met with more accepted reviews, it was serialized in Redbook magazine, and
144
was shortlisted for the 1975 National Book Award. By the time Song of
Solomon came out, Morrison succeeded a dominant place as one of America’s
famous novelists. Morrison’s reputation was further enhanced by receipt of the
Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Beloved and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
Morrison is often burdened for her demonstrations of a matriarchal culture that
puts poor, uneducated black females, with a small number of positive black
male characters and approximately no white characters. Some critics think that
this is to a certain extent because of her endeavor to construct an idea that is
exclusively black and distinctively feminist.
The Bluest Eye is a critique not only of the standards of female beauty
approved by the prevailing white culture, however, acceptance of those
standards by blacks themselves. Pecola is unsuccessful in the test specifically
because of her unconditional internalization of the dominant ideology. Apart
from this, Morrison reiterates black female representation within her fiction,
particularly in The Bluest Eye, Sula and Beloved.
In the conclusion, one can agree with “One is not born, but rather
becomes woman… it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature,
intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine”
(Beauvoir 16). However, in the fictional world of Morrison feminism keeps the
tone of humanism. It becomes a strong weapon in the hands of suppressed and
marginalized. She tries to give the equal justice but naturally her inclination is
towards the black women in which she was born and brought up.
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Works Cited:
Barbara, Christian, Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women
Writers, New York: Pergamon Press, 1985, Print.
Beal, Frances, “Double Jeopardy: To be Black and Female,” The Black
Women: An Anthology (New York: Signet, 1970), Print.
Beauvoir, Simon de. The Second Sex ((London: Picador, 1988), Print.
Bischoff, Joan “The Novels of Toni Morrison: Studies in Thwarted
Sensitivity,” Studies in Black Literature, 6, 3 (1975), Print.
Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1978) Print.
Engels, Frederick. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973) Print.
Faly, Chadwell, Review of Jazz, Library Journal, 15 April 1992, Print.
Giddings, Pania, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on
Race and Sex in America (New York: Morrow, 1984), Print.
Hernton, Calvin, Sex and Racism in America (New York: Grove Press, 1965),
Print.
Kovel, Joel White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984), Print.
LeClair, Thomas “The Language Must Not Sweat: A Conversation with Toni
Morrison,” New Republic, 21 March 1981. Print.
Morrison, Toni, Beloved, London: Vintage, 1987. Print.
---. Sula (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), Print.
---. The Bluest Eye (London: Chatto and Windus, 1979). Print.
---. Jazz, London: Picador, 1992. Print.
---. Paradise, London: Chatto and Windus, 1997. Print.
Naylor Gloria and Toni Morrison, “A Conversation,” Southern Quarterly, 21
(1985). Print.
Nkrumah, Kwame. Class Struggle in Africa (New York: International
Publishers, 1970). Print.
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Parker, Betty. “Complexity, Toni Morrison’s Women-An interview Essay,”
Study Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (Garden
city: Doubleday, 1979). Print.
Phyllis, Klotman “Dick and Jane and Shirley Temple Sensibility in The Bluest
Eye,” Black American Literature Forum, 13(1979), Print.
Stead, Christina. Seven Poor Men of Sydney (London: Avon, 1965), Print.
Steinem, Gloria. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (London: Fontana,
1984). Print.
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