Toni Morrison, Model and Artist

Nobel Prize for Literature winner Toni Morrison is often referred to as a classical contemporary American writer. And I would agree that she is. She has published her seventh novel, Paradise, this year, a novel which keeps her reputation in tact. Morrison has become a writer whose fiction is useful in many academic disciplines. Her themes, characters and plots give us access to thematic, theoretic and historical topics for study in American culture in ways that few works of fiction can ever accomplish.

Morrison is quoted writers in the early eighties, including Alice Walker in 1983, as having said that she writes what she should have been able to read. Walker's interpretation of this is that Morrison, as do many other African American women writers, had to become the model for the creation of her own art. African American women writers, according to Walker, have had to compensate for the lack of models by becoming their own models. Morrison is one of many African American women writers who has constructed models for herself as a writer as well as for many writers to follow.

Morrison's methodology of construction becomes a model for African American women's literature, and for 20th century American literature as a whole. While using American cultural history as a tool for the development of her novels and characters, she also constructs her own model out of characters whose lives are affected by this history. Her novels move deeply into rarely explored historical moments (particularly as they pertain to women) to capture African American and American cultural experiences and issues of the eras in which her characters dwell. She explores these eras and issues through the development of her novels. While this should be expected of literature, especially of 20th century American literature, Morrison goes beyond mainstream expectations by taking her readers into the historical pasts of the characters and of our country.

Hindsight, so they say, is 2020, and Morrison's vision is certainly perfect. She continues to portray characters of the past who exist in eras about which we may have few historical models, but about which we have very few fictional or literary models. Morrison creates and provides these models for us.

She develops the character, Sethe, for instance, based on an actual event in history, writing the story of a mother who chooses to take the life of her child rather than to see it enslaved. Morrison brings this woman to life through the novel BELOVED, and gives us an idea of what the life of this woman would have been like, how her life must have been haunted years after trial, years after emancipation of enslavement, and years after the media had forgotten. Morrison also, in the construction of this novel, brings to the readers attention many difficult issues that were rarely explored about enslaved and/or newly emancipated African American mothers. Very little research and or discussion is published on enslaved African American mothers beyond the patented stereotypes. Morrison challenges and dispels those stereotypes by constructing Sethe and the world in which Sethe lives.

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic