TONI MORRISON

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, U.S.A. Her parents moved to Ohio from the South to escape racism and to find better opportunities in the North. At home, Chloe heard many songs and tales of Southern black folklore. The Woffords were proud of their heritage. Chloe attended an integrated school. In her first grade, she was the only black student in her class and the only one who could read. Chloe Wofford attended the prestigious Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she majored in English with a minor in classics. Since many people couldn't pronounce her first name correctly, she changed it to Toni, a shortened version of her middle name. She graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. She then attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and received a master's degree in 1955. After graduating, Toni was offered a job at Texas Southern University in Houston, where she taught introductory English. Unlike Howard University, where black culture was neglected or minimized, at Texas Southern they "always had Negro history week" and introduced to her the idea of black culture as a discipline rather than just personal family reminiscences. In 1957 she returned to Howard University as a member of faculty. This was a time of civil rights movement and she met several people who were later active in the struggle. At Howard she met and fell in love with a young Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison. They married and had two sons. Toni continued teaching while helping take care of her family. She also joined a small writer's group as a temporary escape from an unhappy married life. Each member was required to bring a story or poem for discussion. One week, having nothing to bring, she quickly wrote a story loosely based on a girl she knew in childhood who had prayed to God for blue eyes. The story was well-received by the group and then Toni put it away thinking she was done with it. Later, she divorced her husband and returned to her parents' house in Lorain with her two sons. In the fall of 1964 Morrison obtained a job at Random House as an associate editor. While her sons were asleep, she started writing. She dusted off the story she had written for the writer's group and decided to make it into a novel, The Bluest Eye, which was eventually published in 1970 to much critical acclaim, although it was not commercially successful. In 1967 she was transferred to New York and became a senior editor at Random House. From 1971-1972 Morrison was the associate professor of English at the State University of New York. In addition, she soon started writing her second novel where she focused on a friendship between two adult black women. Sula was published in 1973. It became an alternate selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club and it was nominated for the 1975 National Book Award in fiction. From 1976-1977, she was a visiting lecturer at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. She was also writing her third novel. This time she focused on strong black male characters. Her insight into male world came from watching her sons. Song of Solomon was published in 1977. It won the National Book Critic's Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Morrison was also appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the National Council on the Arts. In 1981 she published her fourth novel, Tar Baby, where for the first time she describes interaction between black and white characters. In 1983, Morrison left her position at Random House. In 1984 she was named the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the State University of New York in Albany.

While living in Albany, she started writing her first play, Dreaming Emmett. It was based on the true story of Emmett Till, a black teenager killed by racist whites in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman. The play premiered January 4, 1986 at the Marketplace Theater in Albany but it was never published. Morrison's next novel, Beloved, was influenced by a published story about a slave, Margaret Garner, who in 1851 escaped with her children to Ohio from her master in Kentucky. When she was about to be recaptured, she tried to kill her children rather than return them to life of slavery. Beloved was published in 1987 and was a bestseller. In 1988 it won the Pulitzer prize for fiction. In 1987, Toni Morrison was named the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University. She became the first black woman writer to hold a named chair at an Ivy League University. She also started her next novel, Jazz, about life in the 1920's. The book was published in 1992. In 1993, Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was the eighth woman and the first black woman to do so. Since then she published three more novels: Paradise (1998), Love (2003), A Mercy (2008). She also authored a critical work, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) and Remember: The Journey to School Integration (2004). Carolyn C. Denard published What Moves in the Margin : Selected Fiction (2008) Morrison has also published books for children with her son Slade Morrison: The Big Box (1999), The Book of Mean People (2002), The Lion or the Mouse? (2003), The Ant or the Grasshopper? (2003), The Poppy or the Snake? (2004)

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Toni Morrison's fiction Black culture: oral tradition, use of language, folklore, values Morrison's world: excess, grotesque, ambivalence, satire

The grotesque: confound the ridiculous and the terrifying, the fantastic and the real, the human and the bestial. Grotesque images are provocative, for they create a clash between incompatible reactions - laughter on the one hand and horror or disgust on the other. Satire reduces the spiritual and abstract to the same level as the physical and material, concentrating for this purpose on the natural functions of the body. With this focus, narrative satire reduces all that might be heroic and noble to a common level of physical experience which it openly acknowledges, if it does not always joyously celebrate.(10) Toni Morrison's assertions on her fiction: What makes a book 'Black'? The most valuable point of entry into the question of cultural (or racial) distinction, the one most fraught, is its language - its unpoliced, seditious, confrontational, manipulative, inventive, disruptive, masked and unmasking language"

"The only analogy I have for it is in music." Language, orality: "There was an articulate literature before there was print. There were griots. They memorized it. People heard it. It is important that there is sound in my books - that you can hear it, that I can hear it." SULA Introductory pages (literary frame) - the chronology (1919-1965) is absent but is historical referent. "The nigger joke" as myth of origins - the historical and social commentary The tone of this passage, like the tone of the "nigger joke," may be described as tragicomic. Tragicomedy has much in common with the Negro blues. As Ralph Ellison explains, "The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near- comic lyricism" "laughter was part of the pain. A shucking, knee-slapping, wet-eyed laughter that could even describe and explain how they came to be where they were." (4) Binary oppositions, paradox, irony, ambiguity - settles the tone for the whole narrative Language-reality: Beginning with the "nigger joke," Morrison reminds us that there is no proper meaning inherent in words or names - just as there is no correct meaning for Sula's birthmark (114) or for the plague of robins (89) - only meanings we assign to people and events in our attempts to establish the limits. binary oppositions: Past/present; construction/destruction, continuity/change, top/bottom, valley/hill, presence/absence, peace/war, order/chaos, appearance/reality, right/wrong, good/evil, white/black, life/death Past: the Bottom first became a community when a master gave it to his former slave. This "gift" was in fact a trick. The bottom is the top. Present: wealthy whites have taken a liking to the land. The black neighborhood gave place to a golf course (destruction / construction); black neighborhood/suburbs; .) homogeneity encroaches upon what was once unique. Characters binary oppositions/connections also play in pairs of characters: Nel/Sula, Sula/Shadrack, the Deweys Sula: wild, independent, total disregard for social conventions. The birthmark: ambivalent perceptions - a stemmed rose, a snake, or Hannah's ashes. 3

According to the author, Sula is "quintessentially black, metaphysically black, if you will, which is not melanin and certainly not unquestioning fidelity to the tribe". "She is new world black and new world woman extracting choice from choicelessness, responding inventively to found things. Improvisational. Daring, disruptive, imaginative, modern, out-of-the-house, outlawed, unpolicing, uncontained and uncontainable. And dangerously female". Sula represents "the complex, contradictory, evasive, independent, liquid modernity" which "ushers in the Jazz Age". Wright family contrasts with Peace family: traditional family structure, order, conventions, Christianity, stability, neatness (Helene's house), rigidity/ unconventional family structure, chaos, looseness, eccentricity, freedom, instability (Eva's house) Sula and Nel's friendhip and complementarity: Morrison clearly wants us to recognize that although Nel and Sula appear to be quite different - Nel, quiet and unassuming/Sula, spontaneous and aggressive; Nel, the "good" woman, dutiful friend, respectful daughter, loyal wife, and nurturing mother /Sula, the "evil" woman, the free liberated woman; one the epitome of goodness and the other the embodiment of evil they are also quite similar and, at the same time, they seem to form two halves of a whole person. The "moral" question in the novel: ambivalence and ambiguity Good/Evil, socially approved reactions/human emotions Chicken Little's incident, their secret, guilt, responsibility - after Sula's death, Eva accuses Nel of sharing the guilt for Chicken Little's death. Her accusation forces Nel to confront the unfairness of her judgment against Sula. Nel admits to herself that she had blamed his death entirely on Sula and set herself up as the "good" half of the relationship -the "(W)right" approach to morality? The community - values, perception/ Sula: especially "the church women who frowned on any bodily expression of joy (except when the hand of God commanded it)". Sula is the test, the experiment: The "breath of the snake" represents the members of the community, and unlike Sula, Nel is driven back by "the flick of their tongues." Ironically, the community's labeling of Sula as evil actually improves their own lives. Her presence in the community gives them the impetus to live harmoniously with one another. With Sula's death, the harmony that had reigned in the town quickly dissolves. Morrison: "I was interested . . . in doing a very old, worn-out idea, which was to do something with good and evil, but putting it in different terms" "I started out by thinking that one can never really define good and evil. Sometimes good looks like evil; sometimes evil looks like good - you never really know what it is. It depends on what uses you put it to" How, for example, are we to respond to Eva's abandonment of her children, her loss of a limb, and her torching of Plum? Should we admire her stoutheartedness and her ability to survive, or should we be horrified by her actions? What about the deweys? 4

Should we praise Eva's generosity for housing these stray boys or censure her absentminded treatment of them? Should we admire Sula's courage, her determination to be free and to "make herself"? Or should we loathe her for engaging in casual sex with her best friend's husband? Morrison makes the claim that love is far more complicated than the way in which it is usually perceived. Love is not merely a thing of beauty and moral good, Morrison claims, it is rather a forceful amoral emotion that drives people to actions both selfish and selfless, both beautiful and horrid. In fact, as can be seen in Eva's killing of Plum, love is so complex and intricate; it can imbue a single action with both selfishness and selflessness. In other words, love is not subject to morality. Morrison suggests that the distinction between good and evil is rarely clear-cut. Morrison provides no answers; her goal, is to provoke thought: inquiring what it means to be free, to be in love, to be human, to be black or white, to be good or evil. Other characters: Eva: the matriarch, the sovereign over a huge, rambling, multigenerational household run by women. Helene (or Helen) Wright: a woman who grew up in a "somber house that held four Virgin Marys" (25), a woman whose "dark eyes" are "arched in a perpetual query about other people's manners". Shadrack and Plum - the experience in the war (both fought in WWI). Both return shattered men, unable to re-adjust to reality. Shadrack - invents a ritual to try to deal with his fear of death (National Suicide Day). The town is at first wary of him and his ritual, then, over time, unthinkingly accepts him. A sense of permanence against the fear of change in his satement to Sula: "always". The Deweys - Eva's informally adopted children nobody told apart; Nel's final impression: these young people in the dime store with the cash-register keys around their necks" The final chapter - the circular narrative. Ambiguity: is social progress a blessing or a loss? The disintegration of the collective social identity. Nel reflects on the changes she has seen in her lifetime. The black community of the Bottom has slowly moved into the once all-white city of Medallion to build homes with their wartime wealth. Their job prospects have improved, but she laments the loss of community, which characterized the Bottom. Now, people live in isolated households rather than as a collective whole. When she cries out Sula's name, she is finally able to admit her feelings of love toward Sula and, therefore, is able to mourn her loss. And in grieving for Sula, in letting herself once more see the positives in Sula, Nel is able to mourn for herself, for the sacrifices she made to gain social acceptance, which Sula defined herself by refusing.

Other themes are also comments on life: The need to "order and focus experience" against death, violence, fragmentation, inversion, distortion, racism (Shadrack, Eva) Order as repression (Helene illustrates the problems inherent in excessive order much order breeds repression because it stifles an individual's personality) Final comment: Morrison is more concerned with posing questions than with delivering messages. She encourages her readers to inquire about what it means to be free, to be in love, to be human, to be black or white, to be good or to be evil.