On April 23, Beyonce and Warsan Shire debuted an empowering visual album titled Lemonade in an HBO special dedicated to Black women. It depicted the journey of self-knowledge and healing through stages over a period of time; in the following order intuition, denial, anger, apathy, emptiness, loss, accountability, reformation, forgiveness,resurrection, hope, and redemption. Within each segment lies a woman dealing with her internal demons, societal pressure set against her, her relationship to…
This essay will be discussing how the motif of sacrifice is used by Toni Morrison throughout her novel Sula (1974), namely the sacrifice of motherhood. Sacrifice is found in different forms in Sula; physically through self-mutilation, murder or suicide and also the emotional sacrifice of love. This sacrifice of love is shown primarily through the mothers in the story, through what they have had to give up to keep their children alive. The motif of sacrifice in Sula is most strongly…
Pecola loses her sanity and truly believes she has blue eyes, at one point stating, “Just because I got blue eyes, bluer than theirs, they’re prejudiced” (Morrison, Bluest 197). Just as Pecola was drastically affected by these biased standards of beauty, many African American girls during this time also faced similar issues. Through Pecola, Morrison is able to illustrate the self-loathing and inability to accept one’s self that many girls and women struggled…
Throughout history, American beauty standards have continued to give an unfair advantage to those with light skin. These ideals consequently leave a lasting and painful impression on those that do not fit this criteria. Toni Morrison, an African American female novelist who experienced these hindrances firsthand, brings to light the struggle African Americans face daily to overcome these systematic barriers in her works. Through symbolism and contrasting perspectives that follow…
Alice Walker, in full Alice Malsenior Walker was born on 9th February 1944 in Eatonton Georgia U.S. and is now one of the country’s best-selling writers of literary fiction. Alice walker’s life was life of any African American in 1940s. She was deprived of all the basic amenities and discrimination was rampant all around, which Alice later started expressing through her short stories, novel, poems etc. More than ten million copies of her books are in print." Walker has now become a focal…
by Toni Morrison is a novel following the life of Pecola, a young black girl growing up during The Great Depression in Lorain, Ohio. In this coming of age story, Pecola experiences the harmful effects of beauty standards, racism, trauma, and rape. Pecola, along with other characters in the novel such as Claudia, Frieda, and Cholly Breedlove, experience a world in which innocence is difficult to maintain and outside forces attempt to cause pain at any given chance. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison…
In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison addresses the recurring themes and faults of racial portrayal in American literature. A substantial amount of this analysis has to do with the concept of the racial imaginary and racial canon. Using specific examples from ‘classic’ American authors, the author breaks apart the underpinnings of allegories around race. Morrison asserts that a contributing part of racism is poor portrayals of people of color in literature. This literary criticism crafts complex…
Introduction In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, author Zora Neale Hurston incorporates the figurative presence of a horizon in her framing of the plot’s beginning in end, as well as the personal development that protagonist Janie Mae Crawford experiences in the form of a journey of self-realization. The concept of a horizon is critical to the work in two aspects. First, it serves as a metaphor to exemplify the distance separating Janie from the genuine happiness she seeks, which Hurston…
thrive, when in reality that date is erstwhile. In the novel Beloved, Toni Morrison uniquely portrays a twisted Hero’s Journey through the character of Beloved in order to present to the reader the horrors of living in the past. Morrison establishes the first three steps, of the typically chronological Hero’s Cycle, in an atypical approach throughout the novel by scattering the events in no specific order. Furthermore, Morrison twistedly addresses the idea of the ordinary…
For centuries the African American race has gone through several stages of oppression in which they have been targeted by institutionalized racism. The Bluest eye by Toni Morrison depicts an African American family who is victim to the pressures of society. Pecola Breedlove has been born into a world in which she attempts to fit in and establish herself. However she comes to understand that it will never be possible based on the circumstances in which she lives around. Within Toni Morrison’s…