Toni Morrison

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Date: 2005
Publisher: Gale
Document Type: Biography
Length: 1,995 words

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About this Person
Born: February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, United States
Died: August 05, 2019 in New York, New York, United States
Nationality: American
Occupation: Novelist
Other Names: Wofford, Chloe Anthony; Morrison, Chloe Anthony Wofford; Morrison, Chloe Anthony
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Introduction

Morrison was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first African American to win this honor. Morrison's novels explore issues of African-American female identity in stories that integrate elements of the oral tradition, postmodern literary techniques, and magical realism to give voice to the experiences of women living on the margins of white American society. As a best-selling African-American female author, Morrison represented a breakthrough for other black women novelists to succeed in the mainstream publishing industry. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Song of Solomon (1977), the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Beloved (1987), and the 1996 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Four of her novels were chosen for the Oprah Winfrey national book club, and Beloved was adapted to film as a major motion picture produced by and starring Winfrey.

Biographical Information

Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford, on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, where her father worked as a ship welder. She was very close in age to her sister, with whom she formed a strong bond that has continued throughout her life. Morrison was encouraged by her family to read, and spent much of her childhood at the local library. She graduated with a B.A. from Howard University in 1953, and went on to complete an M.A. in English literature at Cornell University in 1955. She was married in 1958 and had two sons, but divorced in 1964, and became a single mother. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, she worked as an instructor at Texas Southern University in Houston and at Howard University in Washington, D.C. She served as an editor for Random House publishers from 1965 to 1983. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), was expanded from a short story she had written while still in college. Although The Bluest Eye received scant notice at first, Morrison's career as a nationally recognized author was launched with the success of Sula (1973), her second novel, after which The Bluest Eye was retrospectively given renewed consideration as an important work of fiction. While continuing to write novels and children's books, as well as editing several essay collections on issues of race in America, Morrison has taught as a guest professor in English and humanities at a number of colleges and universities, including the State University of New York at Albany and at Purchase, Yale University, Bard College, Harvard University, and Trinity College at Cambridge University in England. Since 1989, she has maintained a post as professor of humanities at Princeton University.

Major Works

Morrison's overarching thematic concern throughout her oeuvre is with issues of African-American female identity in the contemporary world. Her novels offer complex examinations of problems within the African-American community, power dynamics between men and women, and issues of racism in relations between black and white America. Morrison's primary interest lies with the experiences of African-American women, whose quests for individual identity are integrally intertwined with their community and their cultural history. Her fictions are self-consciously concerned with myth, legend, storytelling, and the oral tradition, as well as with memory, history, and historiography, and have thus been recognized as postmodern meta-narratives. Morrison's stories are conscious of African cultural heritage as well as African-American history, thus demonstrating the importance of the past to the struggles of contemporary African Americans. She employs strong elements of Black English in her dialogue and narration to express the importance of language in the formation of identity. Her novels often employ elements of magic, fantasy, and the supernatural, such as the character in Song of Solomon who can fly, or the ghost of a dead child who appears in Beloved. The Bluest Eye, her first novel, is set in the 1940s and addresses issues of race and beauty standards through the figure of Pecola Breedlove, an eleven-year-old African-American girl who dreams of having blue eyes and long, blond hair. After Pecola is raped by her father and becomes pregnant as a result, she descends into insanity and insists that she has “the bluest eyes in the whole world.” Morrison's next three novels, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Tar Baby (1981), are generally regarded as a trilogy. Sula centers on the powerful bonds of friendship between Sula Peace and Nel Wright, who meet as girls and maintain their friendship into adulthood. This bond is ruptured, however, when Nel finds her husband in bed with Sula. In Sula, Morrison explores the importance of female friendship in the formation of individual identity, which in reality is often superseded by women's relationships with men. Song of Solomon centers on the character of Milkman Dead, who is born in the North but journeys to the South, where he discovers that he is a descendant of Solomon, a member of a mythical West African tribe whose members can fly. According to legend, these Africans, captured and enslaved in America, escaped their bondage by flying back to Africa. Song of Solomon explores issues of African-American history and myth in the formation of individual identity. Tar Baby is set on the Isle de Chevaliers in the Caribbean, in contemporary times. With the character of Jadine Childs, a successful fashion model and student of art history, Tar Baby examines the dilemmas of assimilation and cultural identity among middle-class African Americans. Morrison's subsequent three novels, Beloved, Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998), are often loosely grouped as another trilogy, each set in a different period of African-American history: Beloved takes place during the post-Civil War era, with flashbacks to the years of slavery in the South; Jazz is set during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; and Paradise is set during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. Beloved combines elements of magical realism with the tradition of the African-American slave narrative in the story of Sethe, a former slave struggling to raise her children in the post-Civil War era. Sethe once killed her own infant in order to save it from a life of slavery, and the ghost of this dead child comes back to haunt her home as an adolescent girl called Beloved. Jazz concerns a romantic triangle between a woman named Violet, her husband Joe, and an eighteen-year-old girl named Dorcas, whom Joe falls in love with. Joe's passion for Dorcas ultimately results in his shooting and killing her. Enraged by her husband's betrayal, Violet goes to the girl's funeral and cuts the face of the corpse with a knife. As Barbara Williams Lewis pointed out in her essay “The Function of Jazz in Toni Morrison's Jazz,” Morrison's narrative structure and voice in Jazz are based on the structural elements of jazz music. Paradise explores the tensions between the all-black town of Ruby and an all-women convent located on the outskirts of the town. Threatened by the empowerment of women within the convent community, the men of Ruby invade it and massacre the women living there. Love (2003) takes place at the site of a once-luxurious vacation resort catering to African-American visitors. Narrated by L., the former cook at the closed-down resort, Love concerns the internecine struggles between two women, Heed and Christine, over the affections of Bill Cosey, the now-deceased owner of the resort. Heed and Christine began as girlhood friends. Their friendship was destroyed, however, when Cosey, Christine's fifty-two-year-old grandfather, purchased the eleven-year-old Heed from her parents so that he could take her as his child bride. Heed and Christine, now old women, both live in the mansion of the closed-down resort, fiercely battling one another over the ambiguous and still-unsettled will Cosey had scribbled on a restaurant menu. Love examines the different types of love felt by Heed, Christine, and several other women for the deceased man who was—and remains after death—the center of their lives.

Critical Reception

Morrison's novels have been almost universally praised by reviewers, and have been the subject of numerous academic books and essays in the fields of gender studies, ethnic studies, postmodern theory, literary theory, and cultural studies. Many critics praised Morrison's complex treatment of issues of African-American identity in her novels. Gurleen Grewal expressed Morrison's concern with African-American identity throughout her oeuvre in stating, “African Americans must negotiate a place for themselves within a dominant culture; how they situate themselves with respect to their own history and culture is a pervasive theme of Morrison's novels.” Yvonne Atkinson described Morrison's use of Black English as central to her narrative voice, asserting, “Morrison has enveloped the written word in the oral tradition: the use of words from Black English and rituals and style of the oral tradition enhance her texts, and the systems of language, the style, and the lexicon of Black English that Morrison uses in her novels bear Witness to African-American culture.” Karla K. Holloway examined the ways in which Morrison utilizes a lyrical narrative voice in The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon to express African-American experience and construct a sense of cultural identity in the African Diaspora. Holloway asserted, “Morrison's novels recall a West African version of reality that allows the coexistence of the spiritual and physical worlds within the same narrative spaces. In these spaces, mythic voices reconstruct an African-American universe.” Rob Davidson commented on the ways in which Morrison's Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, loosely grouped as a trilogy, function as meta-narratives about the construction of African-American identity; Davidson stated, “One of the most important concerns in the trilogy is the ‘use value’ of narrative. Storytelling is historiography in Morrison's fiction, and in each novel she carefully examines the role of narrative in the reconstitution of both the individual self and society at large.” In an entry on Toni Morrison for the book Postmodernism: Key Figures, Thomas B. Howe observed that Morrison's use of multiple narrative voices in many of her fictions is a key element of her work. Howe noted, “Morrison's fictions repeatedly challenge cultural traditions defined by patriarchal, assimilationist, and totalizing standards. Ever since her first novel … she has set herself in opposition to the European American white mainstream by portraying and celebrating unique, powerful voices of marginalized women from American history and contemporary American life.”

Love, Morrison's latest novel, has been met with rave reviews. Thulani Davis observed, “A distillation of many of [Morrison's] earlier themes, notably the theft of girlhood and wars over times now gone, Love is a rich parable about the damaging past as a demagogue ruling the present.” Adam Langer commented, “Taut and uncompromising, Love is a compact meditation on the aftermath of the civil rights movement, a chilling ghost story about a friendship destroyed by the whims of a wealthy and respected patriarch, an epic saga about the generation gap, a concise reflection on the African-American experience in the twentieth century.” Deborah E. McDowell noted that Love may be regarded as “a retrospective or compendium” of Morrison's thematic treatment of love in her earlier works. McDowell observed that Morrison's oeuvre as a whole represents “a philosophical journey into the heart of love, at times a darkened continent blazed by Morrison's luminous prose, her dazzling lyricism, her labor of love.”

Principal Works

  • The Bluest Eye (novel) 1970
  • Sula (novel) 1973
  • The Black Book [editor] (nonfiction) 1974
  • Song of Solomon (novel) 1977
  • Tar Baby (novel) 1981
  • Dreaming Emmett (play) 1986
  • Beloved (novel) 1987
  • Jazz (novel) 1992
  • Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (essays) 1992
  • Race-ing Justice, En-gender-ing Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction of Social Reality [editor and author of introduction] (essays) 1992
  • The Dancing Mind (speech) 1996
  • Paradise (novel) 1998
  • The Big Box [with Slade Morrison; illustrations by Giselle Potter] (juvenilia) 1999
  • I See You, I See Myself: The Young Life of Jacob Lawrence [with Deba Foxley Leach, Suzanne Wright, and Deborah J. Leach] (juvenilia) 2001
  • The Book of Mean People [with Slade Morrison; illustrations by Pascal Lemaître] (juvenilia) 2002
  • Love (novel) 2003
  • Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? [with Slade Morrison] (juvenilia) 2003

Footnotes:*This work contains the text of Morrison's 1996 acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

FURTHER READINGS

Bibliographies

Middleton, David L. Toni Morrison: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1987, 186 p. Includes considerable criticism on Morrison's first four novels, as well as other writings, interviews, and anthologies.

Mix, Debbie. “Toni Morrison: A Selected Bibliography.” Modern Fiction Studies 39, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 1993): 795-818. Bibliography covering selected criticism on Morrison's novels.

Criticism

Beaulieu, Elizabeth Ann. “Gendering the Genderless: The Case of Toni Morrison's Beloved.Obsidian II 8, no. 1 (spring-summer 1993): 1-17. Examines the blurring of conventional notions of gender in Beloved.

Bell, Bernard W. “Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal Remembrances of Things Past.” In Critical Essays on Toni Morrison's “Beloved,” edited by Barbara H. Solomon, pp. 166-76. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1998. Examination of Beloved as a black feminist text that gives voice to those silenced by slavery.

Bidney, Martin. “Creating a Feminist-Communitarian Romanticism in Beloved: Toni Morrison's New Uses for Blake, Keats, and Wordsworth.” Papers on Language & Literature 36, no. 3 (summer 2000): 271-301. Contends that critics generally ignore Morrison's regeneration of the work of the major British romantic poets in Beloved.

Cormier-Hamilton, Patrice. “Black Naturalism and Toni Morrison: The Journey Away from Self-Love in The Bluest Eye.MELUS 19, no. 4 (winter 1994): 109-27. Provides discussion of the idea of self-love, and Pecola's struggles against loving herself and her race.

Dickerson, Vanessa D. “Summoning SomeBody: The Flesh Made Word in Toni Morrison's Fiction.” In Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women, edited by Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson, pp. 195-216. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Analysis of how Morrison's characters recover and repossess the black female body.

Duvall, John N. “Descent in the ‘House of Chloe’: Race, Rape, and Identity in Tar Baby.” In The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison, pp. 99-117. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Discusses the importance of Morrison's fourth novel, the critically neglected Tar Baby, and its intertextual references to the Book of Genesis.

Eckard, Paula Gallant. “Toni Morrison.” In Maternal Body and Voice in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Lee Smith, pp. 33-37. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Explores how Morrison combines myth and reality in her treatment of maternal experience in The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved.

Galehouse, Maggie. “‘New World Woman’: Toni Morrison's Sula.Papers on Language & Literature 35, no. 4 (fall 1999): 339-62. Explores the independent nature of Sula's title character and raises questions about her accessibility to the reader.

Gillespie, Diane and Missy Dehn Kubitschek. “Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula.” In Toni Morrison's Fiction: Contemporary Criticism, edited by David L. Middleton, pp. 61-91. New York: Garland, 1997. Praises Morrison's representation of female psychological development in Sula.

Iyasere, Solomon O. and Marla W. Iyasere, eds. Understanding Toni Morrison's “Beloved” and “Sula”: Selected Essays and Criticisms of the Works by the Nobel Prize-winning Author. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Pub. Co., 2000, 381 p. Thorough examination of Morrison's works, including a lengthy bibliographic resource.

Langer, Adam. “Star Power.” Book (November/December 2003): 40-6. Provides an overview of Morrison's life and career and discusses her novel Love.

McDowell, Deborah E. “‘The Self and the Other’: Reading Toni Morrison's Sula and the Black Female Text.” In Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, edited by Nellie Y. McKay, pp. 77-90. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988. Maintains that in Sula, Morrison creates a different kind of identity for the black female in America.

McKay, Nellie. “An Interview with Toni Morrison.” Contemporary Literature 24, no. 4 (winter 1983): 413-29. McKay talks with Morrison about black women's writing and her first four novels.

Mitchell, Angelyn. “‘Sth, I Know That Woman’: History, Gender, and the South in Toni Morrison's Jazz.Studies in the Literary Imagination 31, no. 2 (fall 1998): 49-60. Asserts that in Jazz, Morrison fuses her primary concerns: the lives of black women and the historical circumstances of life in the South.

Peach, Linden. “The 1990s: Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998).” In Toni Morrison, pp. 126-71. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. Provides discussion of the themes, motifs, and structure, as well as the cultural and historical context, of Jazz and Paradise.

Peterson, Nancy J. “Toni Morrison Double Issue.” Modern Fiction Studies 39, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 1993): 461-794. A special double issue containing essays by a variety of critics on Morrison's novels and her place in the literary canon.

Rigney, Barbara Hill. The Voices of Toni Morrison. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991, 127 p. Examination of Morrison's position within the discourses of both race and gender.

Storhoff, Gary. “‘Anaconda Love’: Parental Enmeshment in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.Style 31, no. 2 (summer 1997): 290-309. An examination of the dysfunctional families—both matriarchal and patriarchal—that populate Song of Solomon.

Taylor-Guthrie, Danille, ed. Conversations with Toni Morrison, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994, 293 p. Collection of interviews and conversations between Morrison and various authors and critics including Alice Childress, Robert Stepto, Gloria Naylor, and Bill Moyers.

Trace, Jacqueline. “Dark Goddesses: Black Feminist Theology in Morrison's Beloved.Obsidian II 6, no. 3 (winter 1991): 14-30. Discussion of specific qualities of black feminism and theology in Beloved treating Morrison's use of goddess mythology and its contribution to a new theology for African-American women.

Wagner, Linda W. “Toni Morrison: Mastery of Narrative.” In Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, edited by Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick, pp. 191-204. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Critical assessment of the narrative techniques employed by Morrison in her first four novels.

Willis, Susan. “Eruptions of Funk: Historicising Toni Morrison.” In Reading the Past: Literature and History, edited by Tamsin Spargo, pp. 44-55. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Originally published in 1987, Willis's essay argues that Morrison's novels explore the question of how to maintain an African-American cultural identity in contemporary society.

Source Citation

Source Citation   

Gale Document Number: GALE|DRFAXP059197021