Literary Context: Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford. Both of her parents came from sharecropping families who had moved north in pursuit of better living conditions. She grew up in a lively household and was surrounded by songs, fairy tales, ghost stories, myths, and the language of their African American heritage. The importance of listening to stories and creating them contributed to her love of reading. While attending Howard University she changed her name to Toni ( which came from her middle name Anthony) and was involved in the repertory theatre; their trips to perform gave her the opportunity to observe the African American experience in the south. Not only is Toni Morrison and author but she was also a teacher and editor.

As an editor, she edited a range of books, fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose, on subjects ranging from abortion rights to reparations. She believed that her presence at random house : assured the black author who walked through the door that he doesn’t have to explain everything-somebody is going to understand what he’s trying to do in his terms, no in somebody else’s but in his”.  As an editor she was very hands on and was involved with every step of the publishing process. She believed her perspective as an editor gave her a privileged vantage point from which to appreciate both the author and the text. The most singular project she took on was called the Black Book.  The Black Book is a source for beloved in a very specific sense. It reprints and article titled: A visit to the slave mother who killed her child” which is a contemporary account of Margaret Garners crime and punishment, the historical even that makes up the plot of Beloved.

            Her first novel was The Bluest Eye, which was published in 1970. Morrison’s fascination with language is revealed by her presentation for the vernacular of black people in her novels. “Black style is not”-she warned us “ as some writers think, ‘dropping g’s’ it is rather the oral quality and the restoration for the language to its original power”. Toni Morrison likes to polish clichés and recover their original meanings. Her most striking literary techniques in her first novel are the narrative voice and in the emotional lives of her characters. Her most known novel, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is Beloved. When she was first writing Beloved, Morrison was obsessed with fragments of stories about two different incidents: a child murdered by an ex-slave and the forgiveness of a young lover who helped her murder escape. Morrison set out to write about the interior lives of slaves to fill in the blanks that were left out of the slave narratives when the narrators drew a veil over stories too terrible to relate.

            To study Toni Morrison’s writing, we read the novel Beloved for class. I think Beloved did a great job in what Toni Morrison set out to do, that is writing about the interior lives of slave narratives when narrators drew a veil over stories. Morrison’s writing allows us to see history in a different perspective and clear up those clichés that might have been giving us something other than the whole truth.  We can also see connections to Morrison’s past influences in this novel. Having the experience to go to the south to see southern African American experience could have been an influence in putting together the lives of her southern slave characters. As stated before, as a child one of the things in her household were ghost stories and also the language of her heritage. Beloved could be taken as a ghost story. Many people could assume that Beloved is a ghost. In Beloved Morrison really brings to light the history of African Americans and rips the veil off that most narrators, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin had.

“ I used to think to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But its not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”

            The passage above from Beloved I think really shows that no one will ever forget what they were forced to endure during slavery. Although it is a new time and slavery was abolished the things that happened does not go away. The places where they happened are still there and the people have those images of the places and events etched in their mind, which they pass down generations and generations. All the slaves that had to endure it are long gone but the memory will remain forever and the harsh reality and truth of what they went through will live on forever. Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a great step forward in getting a different perspective of slavery.

             

Works Cited

Thao, Gaushia, Meyer,Sarah, Dipasquale,David. Toni Morrison. Ed. Gaushia, Meyer,Sarah, Dipasqualie,David Thao. 02 28 07. 10 05 2015 <voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/morrison.toni.php#biblio>.

Tally, Justine, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Cambridge Companions Online. Web. 10 May 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL052186111X