Toni Morrison

A Critique on the Identity and Racial Discrimination in Toni Morrison Novels Ms. Yamuna J.KirubaSharmila Research Scholar Assistant Professor Department of English Department of English Vels University, Chennai – 600 117 Vels University,Chennai –600 117 yamuna.s076@gmail.com kiru.sharmi@gmail.com Abstract This paper attempts to focus on how the black people in America suffered for getting their identity and to overcome…

Toni Morrison, author of The Bluest Eye, reflects the feminist theory throughout the novel. Characters narrate the novel from different point of views to help understand the story of the protagonist, Pecola Breedlove, and the hardships of growing up as a young black girl. The eleven-year-old fails to get help because of the suffering from other characters, which eventually contributes to her fate. The feminist theory is presented by Pecola’s desire to be beautiful, black women resisting…

Beloved, one of the numerous prestigious books written by Toni Morrison, is popularly known for its implicit depiction of the African American experiences during slavery. One of the numerous and predominant agonizing experiences was the sexual abuse of the slaves. Most of the whites (slave masters) used their superiority and power to overwhelm the opinion and wish of the slaves especially sexually. These actions exhibited by the whites had a lot of consequences on the slaves. The slaves were…

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison is, at its core, a call to awareness for pressing social injustices, as well as a criticism on how various communities combat those injustices. Through the use of clever symbolism and equivocal character names, Morrison explores central themes of societal and emotional neglect, the needs of minority groups, and violence as a means of resistance. The characters of Hagar and Guitar are both representative of those themes. Though their justifications and actions may…

Although spent mostly in the North, Toni Morrison’s time as a child was filled with the horrid and grotesque stories of African American culture and community in the South during the early 1900s. Because of these stories, Morrison was inspired to tell the story of Sula, a narrative about the living standard of African American people of earlier America. Though on the surface, the story of Sula seems to only touch upon the topics of racism, sex, and friendship, Toni Morrison’s Sula is actually a…

As children, our parents are parents are everything to us. Our world revolves around them and we need them for everything. We depend on them as we grow. Not only for physical things like food and clothing, but we unknowingly depend on them to provide affection and love as well, which in turn creates the skeleton of our emotional being. The Bluest Eye centers on Pecola Breedlove, a young African American girl that wants more than anything to have blue eyes. Sure, she’d like to have lighter skin,…

In the novel titled Beloved, Toni Morrison allows us to explore an African-American family’s struggle against the invigorating effects of slavery throughout the novel. Morrison mainly concentrates on the development of identities for each character through glimpses in disrupted chronology. However, the novel as a whole focuses on the effects of memory and history on the characters. In the novel, the several flashbacks of the past and the reactions to these flashbacks not only allow Sethe to feel…

The novel The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a young African American girl in Ohio who faces great adversity as a result of her race, gender, and age. She wants nothing more than to have blue eyes, believing that they would make her beautiful and improve her quality of life. She lives in a small house with her mother, Pauline, her father, Cholly, and her brother, Sammy. In an excerpt titled “Battle Royal” from Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the narrator faces…

ranges of different ages and races altering and adjusting their physical attributes in order to reach the standards of being beautiful. For not being considered beautiful will lead to lack of self-esteem and rejection among their peers and society. In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the women often face the pressure of society’s idea of “beautiful” through the use of the media to push images on what beauty should look like. Any women falling outside of society’s standards can be labeled as…

the articles “Strangers” by Toni Morrison and “Stranger in the Village” by James Baldwin, the latter serves to provide a first-person point-of-view of the experiences in Morrison’s essay. By examining James Baldwin’s experience as a stranger in a secluded Swiss village, which serves to strengthen the theme of “Strangers,” Baldwin’s experience demonstrates how people in a community can frame a stranger 's identity. This experience allows the reader to see what Morrison is doing to her stranger.…