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
Could that speck actually have been a metaphor used by Morrison to indicate how a dream, or a fantasy, can be rudely pushed away, erased, due to life's realities? The "conditions" that Morrison mentioned could be racism, or could be the terrible home life Pauline was stuck with. Morrison's recollection of writing The Bluest Eye Morrison wrote about the origin of the idea for The Bluest Eye; she began writing it as a short story that was based on a "conversation I had with a friend [presumably an African-American friend] when I was a little girl," the author explained (Mbalia, 1991, p
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
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
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
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
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
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