Toni Morrison What Meanings Can Be Attributed

Toni Morrison

What meanings can be attributed to the literary accomplishments of American author Toni Morrison? How does Morrison use history to portray her stories and her characters? How did Morrison become known as one of the premier African-American authors in America? This paper delves into those issues and others relevant to the writing of Toni Morrison.

What meanings are attributed to the works of Toni Morrison?

Critic Marilyn Sanders Mobley -- in her book Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison: The Cultural Function of Narrative -- writes that Morrison is a "redemptive scribe" (Mobley, 1991, p. 10). One of Morrison's missions is to "correct a cultural misimpression," Mobley explains. She references Morrison's explanation of the need for a writer to correct misimpressions about African-Americans; "Critics generally don't associate black people with ideas. They see marginal people…" and figure that when they read about African-Americans it will be "…just another story about black folks" (Mobley, 10).

Morrison admits to resenting this cultural stereotype, saying, "We are people, not aliens. We live, we love and we die" (Mobley, 10). And so the critic Mobley sees Morrison's work as providing a defense for the "cultural integrity of her people," but Mobley notes that it goes deeper than just "didactic intention" on the part of the author. What Morrison really wants to do with her brilliant narratives is to provide a "cultural transformation" -- in three distinct ways. The first way is to "fill the cultural void" that exists due to history's transitions away from traditional black cultural activities.

For example, the "oral tradition" (storytelling) that African-Americans once participated in often is now lost albeit this tradition helped black folks sustain "…a sense of community" in order to enrich their lives (Mobley, 11). And so Morrison sees this gap in the culture of her people and uses her writing skills to try and fill that gap. Secondly, Mobley explains (11) that Morrison goes about endowing "commonplace people, places, and stories" with the "mythic grandeur and significance of archetypal narrative and ritual" that hopefully will come to the rescue of "neglected literary material" as well as the cultural values on which that literary material is based (Mobley, 11). What Mobley means by "mythic grandeur" in this sense is that myth helps orient audience between the natural world and the "world of possibility" (12).

The third way in which Morrison attempts to fill the cultural void in her books is by celebrating the past; that is, Morrison uses characters and themes as a "dynamic vehicle for preserving, transmitting, and reshaping the culture" (Mobley, 12). In other words, by creating stories that bring the previous values and traditions of black folks to life, she is helping to preserve history while at the same time entertaining and educating readers.

Author Stelamaris Coser continues along the same lines as Mobley vis-a-vis Morrison's ability to transcend so-called "black" or "feminist" literature and instead "…recapture and reorganize the fragments of collective history into a new type of narrative (Coser, 19934, p. 16). The way in which Morrison uses creative "folk rituals" -- helping to popularize the roots of contemporary African-American culture -- is highly effective and entirely original (Coser, 16). Moreover, Morrison juxtaposes the "starkest representations of racial, sexual, economic, and cultural abuse" -- alongside her apt use of myth and imagination -- in order to "counter" the facts that were left by the "colonizer of yesterday" (think slavery) (Coser, 16).

Morrison would certainly like to reverse the present order of racism in the society, but, Coser continues, instead her resistance to the bleak past is presented through an "attitude of the present in the professional urban world of advanced capitalism and corporate management" (16). And it isn't just that Morrison is filling in the cultural gaps for black people to be fully aware and proud of their heritage; Coser (169) asserts that Morrison's stories "…contain openings for the reader to fill in." Those openings are actually "invitations" to the readers to "re-imagine" and "rewrite" in their own minds the responsibilities and privileges that all humanity share. In her novel Jazz, Morrison describes this music as having "…a quality of hunger and disturbance that never ends" (Coser, 169). The implication is clear: like jazz, a culture also has a hunger and hence should make a cultural disturbance and never stop making that disturbance.

Tony Morrison -- the meaning in The Black Book

Meanwhile author Nancy Peterson critiques Morrison's The Black Book, suggesting that Morrison did not totally approve of the Black Power movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Why? Because she believed that Black Power was more about "exoticism" than it was about "reality" (Peterson, 2001, p. 58). In fact many militants in the Black Power movement were eager to abandon the past entirely in order to "…cure the cancer of slavery" (Peterson, 58). However, it is Morrison's view that by discounting the past (and attempting in the process to cure its cancerous reality) some "healthy as well as malignant cells were destroyed"; hence, in addition to repudiating slavery, the modern Black Power advocates also repudiated "…any knowledge of those qualities of resistance, excellence, and integrity" that were important components of African-Americans' past -- including their past as slaves (Peterson, 58).

Morrison's meaning in writing The Black Book was to point out "admirable qualities of ordinary black people in America," Peterson continues (58). In The Black Book Morrison points out worthy black inventors who made contributions to the American society (inventing "overshoes, an 'air-ship,' a telephone system, an improved fountain pen, a corn harvester, a street sweeper, an egg beater") (Peterson, 58). Indeed The Black Book is a thoroughly unconventional publication, with no chronology, no chapters and no "major theme," Peterson explains (58).

Clearly this unique book was meant to show that African-Americans did accomplish a great deal towards the modernization of America, but it also points out that "…racism" played an ugly role in American history. For example, the wife of W.C. Handy (considered the "Father of the Blues") died on the doorstep of Sydenham Hospital, a private hospital that only takes members (Peterson, 59). That event is presented in The Black Book as a simple newspaper clipping, but we can "…discern that racism, and not private / public distinction [of hospitals] lies behind the failure to take care of this woman" (Peterson, 59).

Toni Morrison -- the meanings in Beloved

"…Consider Beloved as a montage of differing realities, of the multiple identities within the text…a cultural manifestation of multiple constituencies that disrupt or overturn dominant cultural views of blacks as absent or negated… [And] the retelling of the story, in pieces, by different narrators…confronts the dominant culture…moving the marginalized other from eroticized object to a subject…threatening the dominant culture's subject position"

(Schreiber, 2001, p. 121-22)

Writing in the peer-reviewed journal Language in India, critic Mahboobeh Khaleghi asserts that while Morrison shows "…what slavery did to black people bodies and minds," she also presents the notion that by confronting, "reclaiming and transforming history" the African-American culture can heal through the "potential of memory" (Khaleghi, 2012, p. 1). Morrison's crafty storytelling takes readers on a historical journey to the life of Margaret Garner (given the name Sethe in the novel) in 1856, who "…killed her child to prevent her recapture into slavery" (Khaleghi, 1). The author offers historical accounts of how slavery didn't just keep people in bondage in order to conduct hard work in the fields. Morrison points out that the system of slavery "…called for the crushing of the language, family names, culture, and tribal history of the slaves" (Khaleghi, 1).

Slaves were treated "worse than animals," which is not a revelation unique to Morrison, but by using her brilliant storytelling skills, she offers the reader the heartbreaking tale of Sethe, whose only gift for her children is her breast milk. "Milk is all I ever had," she explains (Beloved, 195). And even though Sethe is six months pregnant, she runs away from her master and, with the help of a white girl named Amy Denver, the baby is delivered safely. In time Sethe kills the baby -- committing infanticide -- in order to save her daughter from a life of slavery. One of the profoundly emotional phases of the book is when the murdered baby returns as a ghost.

Morrison in this novel is certainly writing about some of the most bitterly inhumane aspects of slavery, and yet the narrative tells a story within a story -- a story of the "journey to self-reliance" and of the way in which a female slave can achieve a "black identity" in a time when many slaves had been denied their true identity. Claiming ownership of one's self was very difficult for slaves, but Morrison's characters come to life as they go through the process of that experience.

Author Alice Hall writes in her 2012 book, Disability and Modern Fiction that in the novel Beloved Morrison's meaning is captured through the coexistence of "…beauty and horror" on the one hand and "traumatic memory" on the other hand (74). Basically Hall is saying that Morrison is using an unusual approach to beauty by presenting communication not so much through verbalizing but through descriptions of the black female body. In Beloved Morrison uses her narrative to denote "sound, smell, movement and touch" and hence Morrison is able to fully present the bodies of Sethe, of Baby Suggs and Nan as the "scarred" and "enslaved" and "displaced" bodies that they are (Hall, 74).

Beloved isn't the only book in which Morrison's meaning come through by juxtaposing beauty with unthinkable cruelty and pain, but in Beloved the author creates pictures in the minds of readers by showing the character Beloved as a person with "flawless beauty" (Hall, 74). Beloved has "…new skin, lineless and smooth, including the knuckles of her hands" (Morrison, 61). By turning the reader's attention to the soft beauty of Beloved's physical appearance, Morrison is contrasting that character's lovely appearance with the reality in her life, the "…monstrous, haunting and all-consuming interior vengeance" in the society outside (Hall, 75).

In fact Hall suggests that the stunning purity of Beloved could be a possible justification or motive for Sethe's terrible decision to kill the child; Sethe wants to preserve in her memory the "unsullied, idealized notion" of Beloved's beauty (75). Hall quotes Sethe from page 296 of Beloved to show how the narrator was leading the reader to believe Sethe killed her baby (ironically) to preserve the beauty and purity (a very strange way to preserve beauty indeed):

"The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing -- the part of her that was clean…" (Morrison, 296) (Hall, 75).

Does Morrison run the risk of presenting unnecessary drama by transitioning from "horror" to "pleasure" in Beloved? Does she transform violence into beauty for literary purposes alone or does Morrison present such lushness and style to somehow "mediate the horror that she depicts"? (Hall, 75). Reading Morrison one must realize that she has become the symbol and the standard-bearer of African-American female authors because she is able to link fiction in vivid historical context. She has earned the right to boldly present materials that clashes with imaged presented in the same paragraph or same sentence. To wit, the scars on Sethe's back of course reflect what slavery did to millions of black people; but those scars are also linked to Morrison's The Black Book because in The Black Book there is a portrait of an escaped slave whose back is "…furrowed and scarred with the traces of a whipping administered on Christmas-day last" (Morrison, 9) (Hall, 76).

Why did Morrison use the image of a murdered child who comes back to live with its mother 18 years after it (Beloved) had been killed? Author Therese Higgins believes that Morrison brought a ghost into this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel because there is an African belief that "ancestral spirits" do return to their living relatives' homes (Higgins, 2001, p. 29). Indeed many African societies do believe that the dead come back to the family they had lived with, and the dead return "…either in body or in spirit," Higgins writes (29). Why do African societies like the Kenya and the Abaluyia believe in the return of the dead? According to Higgins' research, the dead are believed to "…possess the power of affecting the health and general well-being of their living relatives" (29).

Moreover, that ancestral "spirit" is thought to have the same power and personality as it had when it was alive, and, "as such, might be feared or not, but in either case, must be propitiated," Higgins explains on page 29. The African society known as Mende believe that if the spirit that returns had been "wronged during its lifetime," it may be "vengeful" upon return (Higgins, 30). In fact the plot of Beloved displays the "glaring similarities" between what the Mende believe about ghosts / spirits returning and what Morrison has written (Higgins, 31). In Mende belief system the person who dies is "crossing the water" into the world of the dead. And in Beloved, the dead baby "…emerges from the water back into the country of the living"; indeed, water is among the most powerful and "sustaining" images in Beloved, Higgins reports to readers (31).

Meanwhile, in her book Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion, author Missy Dehn Kubitschek finds myriad examples of symbolism in Beloved. For example there is an African rite in which a certain mark is carved into a woman's skin just under the breast. This mark or scar is applied when the woman transcends childhood and moves into adulthood; it also may be a way of identifying the woman as a member of a particular tribe or sect, Kubitschek explains (Kubitschek, 1998, p. 126). Sethe remembers that her mother, Ma'am, had a mark under her breast. And when Ma'am is lynched and burned, her body "…is so badly damaged" that the mark doesn't show (Kubitschek, 126). The symbolism here, according to Kubitschek, is that slavery totally "obliterated African identity" even though the horror lingers on (126).

Author Philip Page asserts that Sethe and Paul D. have to tell and retell things about the past in order to attempt to "…free themselves from its paralyzing power," and yet by retelling and revisiting the past they risk "…losing their precarious sanity as well as hopes for a new life together" (Page, 1995, p. 144). The author calls this situation a "two-edged sword" and a "paradox" by Morrison, and this concept continues in the novel as all four of the main characters go through "birth/rebirth journeys across water," and those journeys become symbolic of birth and/or reincarnation (Page, 144).

Those births and rebirths contrast sharply with the background of Beloved, which is steeped in death and darkness. Morrison has a technical reason for these contrasts, and in the case of Beloved, her "agonizing journey epitomizes the theme and pain of bringing anything back to life" (page, 146). As any novelist knows, without conflict, contrasts, juxtapositions and the collision of opposites the storytelling can fall flat. But for Morrison in Beloved, even returning to life for African-Americans can hurt: "Anything dead coming back to life hurts," she writes (35). Reviving the souls of the dead in this novel turns out to be a "painful" and yet "magical resurrection" (Page, 146). Part of the pain of coming back to life, at least for Beloved, is that she cannot describe her passage back from the dead. "How can I say things in pictures?" she asks (Morrison, 2010).

There is pain everywhere a reader lands in this book, and everywhere there is also the search for relief from the pain, which is what slaves sought for so many years when that evil institution enslaved millions of black people from Africa. Sethe is hurting because she needs to tell her story to someone, anyone, especially a female; but the only female she can related to even in a vague way is Nan, who was not very literate. So Sethe relies on talking to God, using her "talk/think" style of communication -- kind of a prayer through conversation in search of a way to "piece it all back together" (Morrison, 22) (Page, 151).

Author Brooks Bouson argues that among the images and themes of Morrison's most noteworthy book, Beloved, the author wants readers to understand how slave women -- in a very real way -- were turned into reproduction machines. Black women were objectified as the "Other" due to the fact that they could produce children "…as easily as animals" (Bouson, 2000, p. 138). Because slave owners saw the possibility of breeding humans just like they breed animals, it justified the slave owners "interference in the reproductive rights of enslaved Africans" (Bouson, 138). It wasn't just cruelty to push a breeding program onto the slaves, it was economics. "…Every slave child born represented a valuable unit of property, another unit of labor, and, if female, the prospects of more slaves" (Morrison, 76) (Bouson, 138).

In fact the black family was not allowed to bond as in normal human relations, Morrison explains in Beloved; mothers were not (in many cases) allowed to nurture their newborns and hence the love that strengthens black family networks was absent, Bouson continues (138). Because white owners had the power to define Sethe as "less than human," and while the men in Sweet Home wait for her to pick one of them it is known these same men are known to have had sex with animals, Sethe is deeply shamed. Certainly the character of Sethe, in Morrison's mind, is subjected to the same dehumanizing dramas as many black slave women went through during that ugly period in American history. It is sickening for a reader to realize that while characters Sethe and Halle are having sex in the cornfield, the men in Sweet Home are "erect as dogs" wishing they were out there doing the same thing to Sethe. Paul D. says the "…jump…from a calf to a girl wasn't all that mighty" (Bouson, 140).

Could these kinds of hideously unjust things have happened with regularity in the world of American slavery -- men fornicating with cows one day and raping African slaves the next day? Morrison wants readers to imagine just how horrifying this kind of life was for millions of woman back in the days of legal slavery.

Toni Morrison's meaning in Jazz

The music depicted in Morrison's narrative in Jazz represents the "…original African-American response" to the great human need for good communication between people (Harding, et al., 1994, p. 129). Harding compares the music that black artists and listeners enjoy -- jazz has its roots in the African-American community -- to the need for and the art of storytelling (129). Music making, like storytelling, is "…collective, improvisational, and cumulative," Harding explains; and hence jazz involves the beliefs and actions of individuals anonymously (129). Music can be made sad or positive no matter where a person is or what his or her situation may be.

Jazz is always available for the community to respond to because it is "instantaneous and ephemeral" and hence it is also "eternal and timeless," ideally suited to a culture that clings to rituals that soothe the soul in times of unfairness or cruelty. Jazz can take listeners away to a better time in an instant, and moreover, Harding points out that the black community can be transformed from a frightening place into a place that provides some semblance of a safe harbor. In the novel Jazz Morrison shows that the black citizens in Cincinnati -- unlike the people in Beloved that delved into the past to create "continuity and coherence in the present" -- characters in Jazz "return to the past to conceptualize black existence for the future" (Harding, 127). In fact the black characters in Cincinnati in this novel -- while they do "nurse individual wounds" -- also unite on a "habitual" level against the "common external enemy" (Harding, 127).

There are private rituals that characters act out, some of them based on "personal mythologies" that are, upon closer examination, based on the pressure placed on black folks by the "dominant cultural myths" they must endure (Harding, 128). As to Morrison's meaning in Jazz, the African-Americans in Cincinnati have been divided and disturbed by the "dominant" culture (the white establishment) -- just as the African-American culture was disturbed and divided by slave-owning Caucasians at the beginning of the American experience.

Toni Morrison's meaning in The Bluest Eye

In this story Morrison introduces readers (as if they don't already know) to the fact that most modes of mass-media representations in the dominant culture "…idealize whiteness and devalue blackness" (Samuels, 2001, p. 105). There could not be a story by any author that could so clearly point to the fact that cultural and commercial reflections of whiteness are very correct and proper and accepted. In The Bluest Eye Morrison notes that boys, toys, billboards, movies, magazines and newspapers make white out to be the worthy image -- but black reflects unworthiness and ugliness.

The character Claudia receives a Raggedy Ann doll and tears it apart to find out why so many little girls want a doll like that. "…All the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl treasured," Morrison wrote on page 20 of the novel (Samuels, 106). In the process of trying to discover the magic that draws girls to a "pink-skinned doll" Claudia (who is of course African-American) becomes confused. She wonders, is it the beauty in the doll or the fact that the doll is not black that makes this doll so popular? In fact this is Morrison's way of showing the way that institutional racism creeps into the material world of toys, and that at the end of the day it is no less demeaning to black folks than outright bigotry.

Beauty in this story becomes an "…ethnocentric capital commodity" while "ugliness and blackness" reflect various forms of "economic failure and devaluation" (Samuels, 107). Morrison, the narrator, points out that the African-American family known as the Breedloves lived in a run-down storefront facility not because there were "cutbacks at the plant" (Samuels, 107). In fact the Breedloves lived in that miserable situation "…because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly" (Morrison, 38) (Samuels, 107).

James Robert Saunders writes in the peer-reviewed journal The Midwest Quarterly that the character Pauline in The Bluest Eye went to the movies as an obvious means of escape from her abusive husband. And while in the movie theater Pauline would imagine that she, Pauline, was in fact one of the "…glamorous women up there on the screen" albeit Morrison made clear in her narrative that Pauline Breedlove (and the whole Breedlove family) was unattractive (Saunders, 2012, p. 194). Here's how Morrison describes the ugliness of the Breedlove family, a painstakingly presented yet painful to read passage: